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THE LOG OF THE 
"EASYWAY" 

JOHN L. MATHEWS 



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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



THE 
LOG OF THE EASY WAY 




^ 



The 

Log of the Easy Way 



BY 



JOHN L. MATHEWS 

Author or "Thk Conservation of Water," etc. 



ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS 
BY THE AUTHOR 




BOSTON 
SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



Copyright, 1911 

By Small, Maynard and Company 
(incorporated) 



Entered at Stationers^ Hall 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



>CI.A30<<0G2 

. \ 



PREFACE 

Where we can lay our hands upon it in a 
moment when the whim comes upon us, is the 
original Log of the Easy Way, an envelope full 
of loose sheets of paper, at least a page for 
every day of the seven months of drifting, the 
events of the day, the place we moored, the 
miles we travelled — the data which are neces- 
sary for ordering the main events- 
Best of all in these loose pages there are 
other notes, set down from day to day, that 
ndicate the more vital things, the thoughts 
that came to us, the indications, that only we 
ourselves can discover and delight in, of the 
creation of new points of view, new habits, new 
knowledge as we went through sunlight and 
storm, through happy days and sad days to- 
gether. And with it the spirit of vagabondage, 
the loosening of the bonds which grip the mind 
the hard routine and the enforced conventions 
of city life gradually yielding and permitting the 
mentally footloose condition of the true philo- 
sophical vagabond. We did not reach this 
condition then, for it is one of evolution and 
growth ; but those early stages when we were 
learning to know men and women as they were 

V 



PREFACE 

to meet them in their own paths, and were no 
longer foot-bound in our own — they are re- 
corded in this beloved Log. 

The torn and tattered pages of our chart 
share the same envelope with them — bound 
sheets of detail maps which guided us down 
the river. On every leaf they are annotated 
for every day, sometimes notes similar to those 
in the Log, but more commonly little incidents, 
strange meetings, accidents, specific items of 
other shanty-boat folks, delights we thought of 
along the way, set down at the mile post at 
which they belong. 

These two things, the tattered chart and the 
Log, constitute our only tangible records of 
the Easy Way\ they strengthen and refresh our 
memories. Yet there are many memories which 
can never fade, so avid were our new lives for 
the impressions we were receiving, so nascent 
to the experiences the Great Water developed 
for us. 

As we grew together then, and worked to- 
gether upon the Easy Way, so we have grown 
together and worked together in this story from 
its Log. Though it bears my name upon the 
titlepage, that is because I. was elected narrator. 
It is a work of equal partnership, built out of 
the memories of aches and troubles, of struggle 
and toil, no less than out of leisurely drifting, 

vi 



PREFACE 

of days of fine pleasure, of awakening experi- 
ences which make us cherish as a thing deep 
in ourselves this record of our first journey 
together. 

John L. Mathews. 
May 24, 191 1. 



Vll 



CONTENTS 



Chapter 

I The Easy Way .... 

II The Old Canal .... 

III Adrift at Last .... 

IV The Illinois 

V Some Carefree Traveling 

VI The Mississippi .... 

VII A Peopled River . . . 

VIII We Run Away from Winte 

IX In the Great Eddy . . 

X Good Traveling Days 

XI We Come to Vicksburg . 

XII Vicksburg and Hard Labor 

XIII Neighbors, Good and Bad 

XIV Our Journey's End . . . 



Page 
I 

19 
36 

51 

65 

83 

106 

123 
149 
164 
187 
203 
221 
246 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

The Open Road — An Unusually Busy Day 

Frontispiece 

A Glimpse Ahead 22 

Dragging My Eager Wife and My Reluc- 
tant House Behind Me 22 

A Shanty-Boat Fisherman with His Fike- 
Nets 42 

Pulled Up for the Winter. A Shanty-Boat 
ON the Bank 62 

Shanty-Boats at St. Louis — "Oklahoma" . 102 

The Horse-Power Ferry 112 

His Travelling House — Very Typical . . 120 

"Bum Collier's Boy." (He had no other 
name, but it might have been Huck Finn) . . 136 

Barfield, an Arkansas Landing. (Note the 
flood line next the eaves) 144 

Memphis 148 

Stranded Until the "Next Year of Big 
Water," Maybe Ten Years 152 

A Show-Boat at a Landing 156 

xi 



xii ILLUSTRATIONS 

Page 

Interior of a Show-Boat 158 

In the Willows, Memphis 162 

Chute of Number 18 — One of Our Moor- 
ing Places 170 

The Ark and the Arkitect 182 

Four O'clock Tea in Shanty-Boat Town . 200 

Some Shanty-Boat Kids 212 

A View of the Canal We Dug 218 

EsPANTo 236 

A View of Natchez and Vidalia .... 254 

Our First Lugger — Glimpsed of the Upper 

Coast 266 

The Easy Way at the Last Mooring . . . 266 '^ 



THE 
LOG OF THE EASY WAY 



THE 

LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

CHAPTER I 

THE EASY WAY 

It was on the first day of September, 1900, 
that, hunting in every crack and cranny in 
which a boat-builder might be supposed to 
lurk, or whence by purchase or stealth I might 
hope to secure a floating home, I discovered 
Mac, an ancient mariner, moored with his 
long-sufifering family in a house boat of his 
own construction, to the river bank in the 
desolate region beyond the Santa Fe elevator. 
In a dilapidated chicken-coop amid the sweet 
clovers which still lingered in hopeless opposi- 
tion to the murky stream beside them, a dis- 
tracted hen clucked for a lot of tiny ducklings, 
essaying their first adventure upon this " bub- 
bling brook." From the open end of a half 
barrel a mongrel pup barked viciously at me. 
An unstable gang plank, over which the pup 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

stood guard, led across a couple of feet of mud 
and water to the overhanging deck of the 
Annie Mac. 

In my roseate vision, at the moment, Mac, 
whom a halloo summoned forth, was a dweller 
in a House Boat — with large capitals. Later 
we came to have a suspicion that he was, after 
all, only a common, shiftless " shanty-boater." 
But no such suspicion could have been engen- 
dered then, though he was game-legged and 
blear-eyed, and though he proved upon acquaint- 
ance none too strenuous in upholding Truth. In 
regard to liquor his attitude was strictly nolo 
contendere. But in his actual presence his 
slight faults were reduced to a minimum — 
an infinitesimal and not-to-be-considered quan- 
tity — by a certain deprecatory condescension 
with which he reluctantly consented to allow 
his personality to be connected with the idea 
of actual physical effort. He was, in fact, a 
poet, with a soul full of romance; only the 
thought of assisting in a honeymoon made him 
at all our willing servant. But he knew the 
Mississippi from Grafton — he said to the sea, 
at any rate to St. Louis — and when he had 



THE EASY WAY 

consented to engineer the construction of a 
floating home he set to work with the best of 
humor and good sense upon plans which 
should provide for every contingency. 

" How much money you got ? " he asked 
by way of reaching a basis of computation. 
The question touched me a bit too close. 
There was about one hundred and twenty- 
five dollars in the savings bank, and another 
week's salary from a newspaper to be counted 
on, and something to be spent before the 
wedding was over — and there was a girl 
who was used to the comfort and formal- 
ity of a suburban home to be provided for 
properly after the boat was built and launched. 
For this was to be a honeymoon boat. 

We are gypsies by nature, Janet and I. In 
the days of our courtship we had roamed the 
woods and fields together in happy freedom, 
or with some friendly book had found a de- 
serted spot on the shore of Lake Michigan 
and had made camp for an hour or a day above 
the edge of the breakers. Van Dyke was our 
dearest treasure then, and with " Little Ri- 
vers " or " Fisherman's Luck," we sat for 

3 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

hours beside a " friendship fire " on the sandy 
shore and journeyed together, gypsywise, in 
fancy. 

So we had planned that when our wedding 
time should come we would throw aside our 
formal, conventional selves, and step for a 
brief season into the full fellowship of wan- 
derers. We had visions of a traveling van, 
and of roaming in it by easy stages from lake 
to lake along the lovely roads of northeastern 
Illinois and southern Wisconsin. We had 
measured possible stages on the map and had 
planned and dreamed of our camping places 
and our outdoor life. 

But fate was playing with us. This was 
to be no stepping aside for a day into this 
wander world, but a plunging full into the tide 
of a sea of which we had no knowledge or 
experience. During a whole year fate paved 
the way while we planned for other things. 
Every day of my work drove me steadily 
toward the Mississippi and every task which 
was assigned me by the editor had some re- 
lation to this water channel that reaches from 
the back door of Chicago down by the Great 

4 



THE EASY WAY 

Water to the Gulf of Mexico. "The Deep 
Waterway " was a slogan we helped to shout, 
and Janet waxed as enthusiastic over it as I 
did myself. Fate again intervening, the sight 
of an artist starting down this route in a 
house boat on a painting expedition caught 
our eyes two weeks before we were to be 
married. 

The lure was too strong. A new plan crys- 
tallized in an instant. We too would be gyp- 
sies, — but water gypsies in a floating van. 
We would try a floating journey to the South- 
land which we hoped to find as easy and more 
romantic than the wagon journey to the north. 
Hastily we consulted maps, learned that a lit- 
tle craft could go through the Old Canal to 
the Illinois and down that river to the Mis- 
sissippi, and down that mighty stream to its 
chief port. To plan was to act. I flew about 
the city, presenting the new plan to the city 
and Sunday editors and getting orders for 
special stories and for regular correspondence. 
A public commission added an order for a 
commercial report to figure in a memorial to 
Congress; and so at last, we were assured 

5 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

that if we could once get the boat and our- 
selves under way we would, with no abnormal 
setbacks, be able to earn a living and pay our 
way back home again. This problem solved, it 
was only the preliminary financing that pres- 
ently bothered me, when Mac presented his 
inquiry. 

" The boat must cost less than one hundred 
dollars ready for traveling," I said. To my 
amazement and delight it was possible, and 
as Mac entered into the spirit of our plans the 
house boat soon took shape in fancy. That 
night, twenty miles from the Old Canal, Janet 
and I counted our funds and laid our plans, 
discovered economies and defined the hazards, 
and the next day the Easy Way began to take 
shape in fact. 

It was Mac who insisted on laying the cabin 
floor upon the keelsons, in order that the 
height of wall and therefore the wind-resist- 
ing surface might be reduced, that we might 
drift more easily against contrary breezes. It 
was Mac who set the cabin aft and tilted up 
the forward deck. It was Mac who insisted 
on good clean pine in the hull, two- inch stuff 

6 



THE EASY WAY 

all through; and who put in the eight-by- 
twenty box five heavy, length-wise keelsons. 
Rock-reefs and snags and sandbars were old 
acquaintances of his, and he had seen lighter 
built boats go up against them with disastrous 
results. " When you 're going six miles an 
hour and you stop sudden on a rock, it '11 
surprise you some," he said. '' Especial, if 
your sides is thin." He had directed the ef- 
forts of Annie, his spouse, in many a gale 
while she labored heavily at the ash-sweeps 
to keep the boat off a lee bank, and had even 
(so it was whispered behind his back, last 
disgrace of a river man) deigned to take a 
hand in the work himself in an emergency! 
Whence he had come to estimate truly the 
value of a " squatty " effect. Heavily framed 
and heavily planked, with two-by-six timbers 
extending out two feet each side of the cabin 
to support the guard and bear transverse 
shocks, with gunwales two feet high and with- 
out a break from end to end, and lastly with 
heavy straps of iron on the outside, two and 
a half inches wide and half an inch thick, — 
so he built the hull of the Easy Way, while 

7 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

Annie spun oakum for it and Mac's only son 
trailed an old tomato can across the seams and 
pitched them stoutly. The heavy braces and 
timbers seemed odd to us then, but later 
when the Easy Way lay for three hours 
pounding against a steep bank while seas 
broke against the side and their tops went 
over the roof, while trees crashed down in 
the woods close by and less stout craft went 
to the bottom or were torn asunder, we who 
clung to a stanchion in the dry cabin and saw 
not a drop of water enter nor a plank start 
were grateful for each bolt and spike and 
timber in her. 

Annie, Mac's wife, was a voluble, slatternly 
creature, but with a good heart in spite of her 
loose habits of dress and character. She was 
all interest in the bride to be, and when Janet 
stole a day from her " sailmaking," as she 
nautically called her sewing, and made the 
long trip to see how her home was progress- 
ing, Annie seized upon her and did the honors. 
Through her own by-no-means immaculate 
house she marched her, showing with feminine 
pride the innumerable crannies in which a 

8 



THE EASY WAY 

shanty-boat woman has to store her extra sup- 
plies. Janet, enjoying hugely the humor of 
a first experience, exclaimed with amazement 
and delight at the crannies and the house, and 
the frumpy old dame of the shanties became 
our champion forthwith. 

As we look back upon this encounter with 
Annie, in the perspective of later experience, 
it seems to have been the first real test of our 
fitness for what we were later to go through. 
Whatever roughing had come my way in the 
hustle for my living, Janet had remained a 
perfectly nice young person of the suburban 
type, instinctively drawing the lines of caste 
which appertain to suburbs, and thoroughly ac- 
climated to a rich, hide-bound, prejudice-bound 
community, in which even to have described 
Annie as she was would have shocked and 
scandalized an entire assembly. Now she 
came among the very poor and plainly ugly, 
of whom Annie was the symbol; Annie, who 
got drunk often, swore coarsely, probably 
dipped snuff, beat Mac when he angered her, 
but for all that proved to Janet extraordina- 
rily interesting. Just as I had hobnobbed 

9 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

with Mac on our first encounter, so Janet rose 
at once to the full estate of partnership by tak- 
ing Annie for what she was worth — and yet 
treating her as a lady. 

While the Easy Way was building far out 
on the west side, and Janet was still sailmak- 
ing far on the north side, I covered the third 
grand division of the city in search of equip- 
ment, and finally discovered one Barnacle 
fastened, in fulfilment of his name, to the side 
of a street where his second-hand wares 
flowed out over the sidewalk and bade defi- 
ance to the rain. Dickens would have de- 
lighted in this old chap, whose mine of sala- 
bles included everything to be found in the 
most eccentric households. I had a wagon- 
load from him, and on the last day of my 
bachelorhood, a Sunday, mounted upon the 
top of the load, with Barnacle's man Charley 
to drive, traveled away to the Old Canal with 
my new-old possessions. 

Charley examined the load with critical eye. 
His glance fell upon a wash-tub in which was 
neatly coiled some twenty fathoms of choice 
manila line, an inch in diameter. 

lO 



THE EASY WAY 

" Buy that rope ? " he asked with a nod of 
his head. 

" Yes." 

" How much 'd he," — with a backward nod 
— "git fer it." 

" Two dollars." 

*' Humph ! That 's my rope. Feller give 
it to me. Buy that lantern? " 

" Yes, — paid a quarter." 

"Humph! That 's my lantern. Brakeman 
I moved give it to me. Used that rope to 
h'ist planners and the lantern to see with. Buy 
that tub?" 

" Yes." 

" Humph ! That 's my tub, too. Seems like 
I can't keep nothin'. Old Barnacle jes' fastens 
tight on and clings to 'em till he gits a chance 
to sell. He 'd sell his immortal soul if he 
knowed where he could git another, and mine, 
too, if I left it lyin' around the shop whilst I 
was off with the wagon." 

So it was somehow with the feeling of 
being the receiver of stolen property that I 
dumped bacon and ham, chairs, tables, stove, 
canned goods, trunk and books and other im- 

II 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

pedimenta into the cabin about which before 
nightfall walls were to be built. 

With what little help Chum and I could 
give after office hours, Mac had planned and 
built and turned upright the hull. Later, 
under a broiling sun, a whole colony descended 
upon the South Branch to help the work 
along. 

Above the hull rose a single room of a 
cabin, with a roof held on stout carlines 
so that we might use it for an upper deck. 
There was a window in each side and in the 
bow, and a door in either end. All around 
extended a two-foot guard, and forward hung 
an extended deck twelve feet across and eight 
feet fore and aft. 

Chum, temporarily abandoning the law, 
painted the roof with more strength than 
dexterity. His brother and mine drilled 
holes and bolted on the straps. Mac and a 
hired helper laboriously fastened to the tim- 
bers carved oak cavils he had dug up from 
some cranny, to hold our lines; and the 
crew of a tug, with jolly good will, left 
their vessel at the elevator to assist me in 

12 



THE EASY WAY 

putting on the cabin walls. Too much help 
affronted Mac, as a jarring element in a ro- 
mance, and he left in high dudgeon; but an 
enthusiastic sister of mine, sawing straighter 
than woman ever sawed before, built the 
after deck in shipshape fashion. Tugmen 
brought lines and tackle to equip a possible 
square-sail, and another tug threw a line 
ashore and dragged the complete house boat 
into the water; and so, amid great whistling 
and cheering, the Easy Way was floated. 

When the minister had made us one, and 
we came out to Bridgeport to take possession, 
we found Mac's energy had entirely waned 
with the launching. The bunk he had prom- 
ised to build was as yet unshaped, the floor 
unlaid, the lumber to make them lay unsawed 
on the roof. The sweeps were unmounted 
— twelve- foot ash oars — and there was no 
hole cut for the stovepipe. Within the cabin, 
piled on and between the keelsons, was a non- 
descript mass of freight where it had been 
dumped from the wagon before the walls were 
set up. It had been somewhat disarranged by 
the launching, but the stove — triumph of 

13 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

second-hand bargaining — was still on top, 
and the china and groceries were still on the 
bottom. In between were two steamer chairs, 
a hammock, a tub of ropes, a deal table, two 
common kitchen chairs, a crate of books, a 
lot of tinware, and all the odds and ends 
of camping-out housekeeping, with my old 
leather trunk for a bracer. It was to such a 
house that I brought my astonished bride. 
But by nightfall the Easy Way was homey. 
The books were in their places on shelves, a 
set of Lowell hobnobbing with " Huckleberry 
Finn," the "Little Minister" and "Life on 
the Mississippi." The dishes had found se- 
curity behind ledges on other shelves, made 
from odds and ends of flooring. The floor was 
laid, the steamer chairs unfolded, the bunk 
built and the bed made, the lamp filled and 
lighted, the table spread, the oars hung on 
hooks from the rafters, and, through a newly- 
cut hole in the after wall, projected the outlet 
of a piping-hot stove. 

The gale which demolished Galveston 
swept up the Mississippi valley to the Chicago 
Divide and there crossed over to the basin of 

14 



THE EASY WAY 

the Great Lakes. It struck the western sub- 
urbs of Chicago with terrific force, demoHsh- 
ing smokestacks, unroofing buildings, and 
driving the surface of the streets in clouds in 
the faces of those who had to travel upon 
them. It piled the water of the river and of 
the ancient Illinois and Michigan canal into 
waves, ripped off the crests from these and 
sent them in spray high in air over the tops 
of wharves and lumber piles. At Bridgeport, 
where the canal and river meet, it howled and 
whistled about the roof of the Easy Way. 
The little vessel was moored to the piling close 
to the lock of the gate — the mooring of an 
inexperienced boatman who, a week later, 
would have hung his vessel easily in a ham- 
mock of lines well away from the shore. Now 
and again MacEwen of the lock or his assist- 
ant came along the bank with an armful of 
split kindlings, a pike pole or some other 
friendly gift; and a head bobbed out of the 
doorway to exchange greetings with them. A 
few grains of rice on the roof of the boat, 
sheltered in the seams of the canvas, defied 
the gale to dislodge them. A pot of paint on 

15 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

the bank told of frustrated attempts to deco- 
rate the walls with white bands and cupids. 

An unpainted, rakish, but sturdy little ves- 
sel, newly joined together by a competent 
shipwright, was the Easy Way; and we, who 
were laying the floor and tying up curtains, 
who were as newly joined together and by as 
competent a joiner, we twain were captain 
and mate, cook, crew and passengers. My new 
wife was cooking our first supper in our first 
home — a wonderful supper, which I smell in 
savory memory now when I am hungered, a 
supper fit only for Gods and working men, 
a supper such as never in his life has Tsar 
Nicholas tasted the like of, and failing which 
he has missed a great thing, a supper — 
but why hesitate for similes when to every 
hungry American the names themselves con- 
jure up all I could say — a supper of fried 
ham and eggs and boiled potatoes and bread 
and butter and tea. 

The savor of it was in my nostrils then as 
it is in my memory now. It seemed a happy 
augury for the long journey we had in mind, 
the route of which we studied that night on 

i6 



THE EASY WAY 

map and chart, and which was to take us fif- 
teen hundred miles down the old Illinois and 
Michigan canal to the Illinois river, down the 
Illinois river to the Mississippi, and down the 
Mississippi to the Crescent Bend where river 
•fleets and ocean steamers meet and trans- 
ship their cargoes. The crinkly line across 
the map yielded no sign of what experiences 
might await us on the way. We only knew, 
dimly, indeed, of the bare possibility of it — 
that having been towed through the canal by 
a steamboat, we might drift with the current 
down the rivers, needing no other motive save 
the oars to overcome head winds or to move 
in or out from the bank, or the tiny sail 
which would help us in a fair breeze. A 
hundred feet or a hundred miles, we know not 
what might be the length of a day's drifting. 

" It will take you six weeks," the Managing 
Editor had told us. 

" Ten weeks is a minimum," insisted an- 
other wiseacre. 

For ourselves, we made no guess, being con- 
tent to go the whole journey and finish it when 
we might. Yet as we lay moored in the en- 

17 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

trance to the Old Canal that night, waiting 
the steamer Imperial which would come next 
day to tow us on, Columbus himself, with 
all the experience he must have had in weary 
days and nights upon his quarter-deck, could 
not have conjured up more wonder nor more 
expectation over what the future might bring 
forth. 



i8 



CHAPTER II 

THE OLD CANAL 

The Old Canal was a stream in Fairy Land. 
We fell in love with it. From the first thril- 
ling moment when the towline, made fast to 
the stern of a barge ahead, lifted from the 
water and drew tense; when the Easy Way, 
from her position against the bank, swung 
lightly and easily out into the stream and fol- 
lowed its leader; when the shores began to 
slip by, the lock to dwindle in the distance, the 
figure of MacEwen, the gate-tender, and Bar- 
ron, the fee-collector, to diminish as they stood 
waving their farewells at us — from that mo- 
ment we looked upon the little channel as the 
road to Paradise. 

Through the soft hours of a warm Sep- 
tember afternoon we lounged in dreamy idle- 
ness in our steamer chairs upon the roof of 
the Easy Way, holding each other's hands in 
blissful comtemplation. Goldenrod and wild 

19 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

asters in masses nodded at us from the bank, 
and gigantic sunflowers in magnificent pro- 
fusion of bloom made for us a long avenue of 
gold, reaching back into the distance whence 
we had come, luring us onward, a way of prom- 
ise toward the future. The steersman of the 
barge ahead, bashfully hesitant to turn our 
way lest he surprise us in some honeymoon 
demonstration, called notes of explanation, 
footnotes of history and geography, over his 
shoulder at us, to make clear the text of the 
passage. Now and again we swung close to 
the bank, to pass some upbound stone or coal 
boat, looking as old as the canal itself; no 
rude implement of rushing commerce, but the 
quaint survival of a bygone age in which the 
windowless stone warehouses on the bank, the 
abandoned quarries, the ruined wharves and 
bridges each had its part. 

We swung through long arching avenues 
of elm trees, their tops meeting high over- 
head. We crossed tumbling creeks that 
dropped from the hillsides and gurgled under 
us as we crossed them — on narrow aqueducts, 

bridges of water arched above the land. We 

20 



THE OLD CANAL 

drifted out upon the placid bosom of the Des 
Plaines and crossed it, and went for miles 
through the back dooryards of farmhouses, 
whence dogs barked at us, and hens and 
ducks ran clattering away, and children raced 
after us merrily. We drifted along the hill- 
side and watched the Des Plaines below us 
grow into the Illinois. We saw the Kanka- 
kee merge into it, the Au Sable, and the Du 
Page. Sometimes the canal itself widened to 
a lake, and tiny islets, elm-crowned, stood out 
upon its bosom like graceful ornaments upon 
an artist's ocean. And now and again as we 
dropped lower and lower into the valley of the 
Great Water we came into an old lock, and 
settled through it in all the ease and solem- 
nity with which this ancient manner of car- 
riage is conducted. 

We came to our first stone lock in the early 
evening, when the lights were just beginning 
to twinkle on the hillsides about us, and the sil- 
very surface of the river down below still re- 
flected at its edge a band of crimson from the 
sunset sky. Locks are but familiar devices to 
us now, but there is still present in memory 

21 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

the imperfect, the half understood adventure 
of this passage; the coming in a bankful 
stream, in the breathless stillness of the even- 
ing, to a stone coping and a gate, beyond 
which yawned dimly a mysterious depth into 
which our consort had vanished; the twink- 
ling lights, the voices hailing each other with 
startling distinctness to give familiar orders 
(so there were those to whom all this was 
familiar! to whom the mystery was not, to 
whom we were but another shanty-boat to be 
locked through — thought unthinkable) out of 
the darkness. Palls clanked. Unseen waters 
gurgled. Vaguely the gate swung open, and 
the Easy Way, itself hesitant, shrinking from 
the unknown ahead, entered. Silently the gates 
closed behind us and our house settled slowly, 
still mysteriously, into a deep well. About us 
all vanished; the dusky hillsides, the twinkling 
windows — themselves pregnant to us with 
their suggestion of other homes, of station- 
ary lives through whose stations we thus 
moved silently, ghostlike, neighbors without 
neighborliness ; of other lovers through whose 
lives we were passing thus unseen, unheeded, 

22 




A glimpse alicad 




Dragging my eager wife and my reluctant house behind me 



THE OLD CANAL 

neither speaking nor spoken to, regardless of 
what infinity of companionship, of aid, of com- 
fort, of affection might He, a germ in the seed, 
waiting but for the gentle stimulus of ac- 
quaintance to spring to life — all this that was 
in our minds and in the vale about us van- 
ished in a moment, shut out by dark stone 
walls, felt rather than seen, which rose out of 
the water about us, slowly, ponderously, with 
a persistent suggestion of the incongruity of 
the idea that heavy stone walls could rise out 
of water; rose, bringing a new, a chilling 
atmosphere that seemed to add to the weird 
strangeness of it all, till we looked only up 
at the receding stars. Voices had ceased. 
Waters about us gurgled softly. Tiny water- 
falls, innumerable and unseen, tinkled musi- 
cally down from the sides of our prisoning 
well. We stood on the deck of the Easy 
Way, living it all intensely, silently. It was 
all that we had come to find, this new, strange 
world; it was all in this lock, that was no 
lock to us, but a miracle ; and in the intermin- 
able instant that it lasted we passed finally 
and completely, beyond the possibility of re- 

23 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

turn, from the old life, the commonplace life 
of the city of which our bachelor days had been 
a part, into the association of imagined things 
in which we were to live broadly ever after. 
It was but an instant ; yet we were beyond re- 
call when out of the darkness spoke distant 
voices, coarse, commonplace, calling above our 
heads. The wall before us gave. A sudden 
myriad of drops chinked and rippled into 
the water about us. In the darkness appeared 
a narrow rift, widening, giving a view of a 
starlit horizon, twinkling lights below us and 
far ahead, duskily looming hills and build- 
ings nearer by, and, bulkily at hand, some- 
thing huge, indescribable, from the summit 
of which the steersman called noisily for our 
towline. And as we moved softly out of the 
embrace of that wonderful gateway, we knew, 
and in a swift handclasp shared the posses- 
sion of the knowledge, that wherever we might 
go, down the Great Water, in this Easy JVay 
with its deal table, its shaded lamp, its com- 
fort and simplicity, or beyond and beyond eter- 
nity, while we went thus together we should 
go not as visitors, but in our own home, 

24 



THE OLD CANAL 

taking it with us as we now took it through 
this valley of the homes of others, through the 
stone gateway of the Old Canal. 

There was in this a new pleasure for us 
we were soon to discover, in that this bring- 
ing of our own familiar, homely life with us 
on our wanderings gave us a standard, a judg- 
ing point to which to relate the lives of those 
about us; so that we saw the familiar, the 
homely in them, and entered daily into the 
pleasures which these others about us found 
in their living. Yet none of them could share 
with us that which we shared together on such 
days as when we locked through beautiful 
Chanahon and in the windless basin below the 
lock set our table by an open window, and dined 
to the accompaniment of nature's harmonies. 
Through the open port came the scent of trees 
and of wildflowers, the songs of birds, the cool, 
sweet air that had passed across the water, 
the murmur of the woods and fields about us, 
reveling in the harvest. An arm's reach be- 
neath the window sill was the water, and the 
gurgle of it against our hull blended enchant- 
ingly with the other sounds. Our open back 

25 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

door gave us a glimpse astern of the lock- 
keeper's house, sheltered, as carefully as a babe 
in a cradle, in its nest of tenderly arching 
elms; the white coping of the lock, bordered 
by neatly clipped grass lawns, the hospitably 
open door through which we could see the 
crew of our towboat dining at a long table. 
We were gypsies by chance and by choice, and 
our lives might have begun and ended in the 
hours of such wedding feasts. 

We came down to Morris that evening, and 
the towboat which brought us thus far left us 
at the bank, having to load corn and turn back 
to the city. Long lines of high-sided farm 
wagons were drawn up at the elevator. The 
hoisting machinery was still whirring despite 
the lateness of the hour, and the melodious 
clank-clanking of it sang into our ears the un- 
familiar song of the corn-harvest. So little 
does Chicago know Illinois, so little the city 
understands the country, that though we, who 
were of the city, had seen all our lives the 
great steamers sailing away with golden ar- 
gosies from the storage bins beside the river, 
it meant till now nothing to us of the life of 

26 



THE OLD CANAL 

the interior of our state. In Chicago corn is a 
freight and a speculation. Slips of paper, tiny 
sacks of carefully sifted kernels, stand for 
shiploads and harvests of it. Machines do all 
that is done to it. No man handles it, feels it, 
knows it for what it is — the product of man's 
labor on the soil. But here we found it on its 
own stage. About us in the lowlands still stood, 
ten feet high, the ripening stalks that bore it. 
Here men plowed, planted, cultivated, gath- 
ered, shelled and shipped it. Here lives were 
spent on it and earned by it; and every yel- 
low kernel in yonder wagons, in yonder ele- 
vator, lifted by the endless chain to shoot 
rattling into the hold of our deserting towboat, 
was a fragment of someone's season's work, 
of someone's winter life — the visible symbol 
of effort wisely spent, the promise of reward 
and the fulfilment of an earlier promise. 

So we had here again that strong sense of 
being strangers in a homely, familiar world, 
or rather of witnessing strange, outlandish 
things in a familiar place; for we had still 
our home, still the cabin of the Easy Way; 
there on the shelves our dog-eared " Huckle- 

27 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

berry Finn " hobnobbed as of old with the worn 
volumes of Lowell, with the " Little Minister " 
and " Fisherman's Luck/' which had been our 
companions in courtship days. There was the 
wonderful in this, the wonderful which no 
amount of use was to make less strange, less 
delightful, in thus bringing our own life into 
juxtaposition with that of these outlanders; 
these people who, of course, we knew must live, 
yet whose lives were as vague nothings to us 
till we passed through them, sensed them and 
were gone — leaving a memory of them which 
is not, as that of so many travelers, the recol- 
lection of a constant change of scenery and the 
vivid image of some startling rock or cataract, 
but rather a substitution of people for names, 
of personalities for places; so that hearing 
the one we feel at once the other; with the 
result that this route we traveled is populated 
for us with people whose purposes, whose 
limitations, whose ambitions, whose handicaps, 
whose daily habits and whose manners of 
thought and action, we know sympathetically; 
so that there stands in our mind as our con- 
ception of the Mississippi valley not a great 

28 



THE OLD CANAL 

river and its many tributaries, not the steam- 
ers and flats that ply it, not a picture of a map 
of many states, from mountain chain to moun- 
tain chain all drained by rivers flowing this 
way to the Gulf, but a thrilling consciousness 
of membership in an enormous community of 
active, eager people, all working and planning 
in different manners and yet with the same 
ultimate humanity at the base, a mass of peo- 
ple with all of whom we are in sympathy, who 
are knit and bound together by an infinity of 
associations and who drain into one great 
stream of life as naturally as their farms and 
villages drain into the Mississippi itself. It 
is this which one should gain in a measure 
from any travel; yet it is not to be gained 
by one who goes as a tourist on tour, as a 
sight-seer among spectacles, as a consciously 
superior being examining to see what defects 
these others have. It requires that one should 
go as a man among men, with a nascent hu- 
manity ready to unite with that of the other 
human atoms about him. 

Even such speed as our easy-going leader 
made for us, therefore, taking two days to 

29 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

accomplish the journey from Bridgeport to 
Morris, and giving us opportunity for meet- 
ing men at many places, was too great for us. 
We wanted to go more slowly, to see more of 
our fellows, to rub elbows with them as they 
lived. We wanted, too, more leisure to see 
and to appreciate the beautiful country in 
which we were. So when our towboat, hav- 
ing its hull crammed with rich yellow corn, 
turned back toward Chicago and left us to 
await the coming of another steamer which 
would hurry us on to the end of the canal, I 
made a towline fast to a corner of the deck, 
shouldered a home-made yoke, and set out 
slowly along the towpath, dragging behind me 
into new places my eager wife and my reluc- 
tant home. 

A faint wind was blowing down the water, 
and dreamy September called us from the 
woods ahead. Illinois, that had been to us 
for so long a government and a map, was sud- 
denly become our estate, our birthright. Hills 
and valleys, precipices, canyons, gorges, caves, 
broad green fields of winter wheat, sear yel- 
low fields of corn, arching elms and scant- 

30 



THE OLD CANAL 

leaved butternuts called to us, set themselves 
up for our notice and proclaimed themselves 
all ous. In mid-afternoon, when we had gone 
five miles or so from Morris, and my aching 
shoulders were thoroughly satisfied with the 
day's work, I hauled my house to the towpath, 
stepped upon the deck, and, with a thrust of 
the pike-pole, which my wife had wielded fre- 
quently during the day, sent us across to the 
" heelpath " side to a mooring among some 
willow trees where shade and beauty of land- 
scape were combined. We left our house there, 
secure and snug, and went ashore upon a 
voyage of discovery. 

One could not find a more charming change 
from the familiar routine of city life than this 
into which we were now thrust. Gone beyond 
recollection were all the little conveniences of 
daily habit. Water faucets had given place 
to the cedar pail, — a lighter substitute for 
the old oaken bucket, — and for electric lights 
and electric bells we had lamps and candles 
and our own whistles. Driftwood and fallen 
branches went under my axe as a ready sub- 
stitute for fuel gas, and for eggs and milk 

31 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

we went marketing, pail and basket in hand, 
to the nearest farmhouse, sometimes a mile 
away. These little journeys were great events 
for us each day, lengthening sometimes into 
calls and even visits with these people who 
shared our Illinois with us. It was a pleasure 
to find that as we were real and openly human 
with them, so were they with us, harboring 
no suspicion, but making us frankly part of 
their own communities. 

Sometimes this brought us a glimpse of 
tragedy in these isolated homes. We strolled 
one day a mile across the fields to a farmhouse 
for a pail of milk and a pat of butter. It was 
a comfortable and hospitable home, but at the 
mention of Chicago in our talk a sudden si- 
lence fell upon the old farmer and his wife. 

" My daughter," said the woman, slowly, 
her face working with grief, "is in' Chicago. 
I don't know where or how she is. She went 
five years ago — to find a place. She writes 
no more. Did you ever hear of her? How 
can I find her? " 

There was no mistaking the fear that lay 
behind her words — and we could ofifer her 

32 



THE OLD CANAL 

little comfort. Our own hearts ached as we 
went away, thinking not only of the farmer 
and his wife, but of the other loser in the 
struggle in the city, ashamed to write, dream- 
ing of this hospitable and comfortable home, 
held by the false pride of youth from 
returning. 

Yet our own youth was irrepressible; we 
were no sooner back in our boat than the 
song of joy was in our hearts again. The 
breeze brought us the odor of crisping hazel- 
nuts just touched by the lightest frost. Carp 
rose to the surface and splashed noisily about 
us, sending concentric ripples outward. We 
swung our feet over the edge of the deck and 
dangled fish lines in the water. From daylight 
till dark there was not a scene, there was 
scarcely a word, to connect us with that life, 
now so remote, when we had not been husband 
and wife. 

It was on Friday when we left Morris. We 
spent Sunday in the bend above Seneca, held 
to the bank by a raging gale, — or rather the 
Easy Way was so detained, while we roamed 
the fields and visited distant farmhouses. On 

33 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

Monday night we were at Marseilles, whose 
twinkling lights on the hilltops lured us on for 
an hour after sundown. And on Tuesday even- 
ing, in a drizzling rain, I stood in the cabin 
with a twelve-foot oar out through the back 
doorway, resting in a socket in the edge of 
the deck, and sculled our house across the 
aqueduct by which the canal is borne above 
Fox river, and then around a long and gentle 
curve into the city of Ottawa. We were 
coming into the Deer Park country now, to 
Starved Rock and Buffalo Rock and all that 
famous and beautiful region where Tonti 
waited so patiently for the lost La Salle, and 
where warring tribes of red men fought to 
extermination. We traveled reluctantly, and 
eagerly moored the Easy Way to climb to 
some hilltop for a view of the valley, or to 
stroll down to the bank of the increasing Il- 
linois. So it was Saturday night again when 
we passed through Lock Thirteen at sunset 
and tied up in a sheltered and lovely pool be- 
low the gate. Great cliffs of stone towered 
above us on the right, and on Sunday morn- 
ing we went over to them, seeking a good 

34 



THE OLD CANAL 

spring of clear water, and found it at the 
mouth of a gorge which led back through 
many windings to other gorges, and to cliffs 
pierced with strange openings at many levels 
— cement mines, whence the stone was being 
conveyed to La Salle for treatment. We spent 
a morning there, and in the afternoon, while 
half La Salle watched up from its hillside win- 
dows, I slowly and wearily pulled the Easy 
Way over the last aqueduct to the last lock, 
and below it to the pool where canal and river 
meet, and where we were to make ready for 
our first real drifting upon the Illinois. 



35 



CHAPTER III 

ADRIFT AT LAST 

All the world had been manifesting its ap- 
proval of our happy estate on this journey 
through the Old Canal. From the collector's 
office at Bridgeport to headquarters at Lock- 
port, and thence to every lock along the way, 
the " story of our lives " had gone by tele- 
phone, with friendly messages to bespeak us 
the best of care. We had not been allowed 
to forget who we were nor why. And lest the 
canal-bank telephone do not enough for us, old 
friends in the Chicago newspaper offices had 
sent printed circulars and announcements to 
postmasters, chiefs of police, mayors and others 
presumably interested in decorating villages. 

Many of these circulars and notices reached 
us, and typical of them was one which the 
blushing postmistress handed us at La Salle 
with a packet of letters neatly tied with white 
ribbons : 

36 



ADRIFT AT LAST 

To THE Residents of the Mississippi Valley, 
Greeting : 

In the interests of science and in an endeavor to 
familiarize the people of your section of this great 
republic with the appearance of a native of the 
Windy City, John Mathews, a literary missionary, 
has set out to go among you. 

Mr. Mathews is not only a missionary but a real 
poet. When he headed for your country the horse- 
less carriage interests had annihilated every speci- 
men of Pegasus in these wilds, so our representa- 
tive secured the next best means of transportation, 
— a house boat. In this he set sail down the 
drainage canal, and in the course of a few days 
is like to tie up at your town wharf and engage in 
a study of your habits, customs and idiosyncrasies. 
When you sight his craft in the distance prepare 
to welcome him with becoming eclat, so that he may 
get a proper conception of your hospitality and so 
report to those who know little of you save what 
has been acquired by perusal of books of travel. 

In honor of this great expedition Mr. Mathews 
has taken unto himself a bride, just before weigh- 
ing anchor. This may not awaken any outburst 
of enthusiasm on your part, but is mentioned merely 
as a kindly suggestion that Cupids, white ribbons, 
hearts and arrows, will be appropriate decorations 
in case you feel it incumbent to decorate your city 
in his honor. A pickaninny band playing the 

37 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

Lohengrin wedding march on cow-bells would 
also be a unique and appropriate feature of his 
reception. 

Commending- him to you as a splendid example 
of the sterling young men produced at the upper 
end of the lakes-to-the-gulf channel, we are, 
Yours for a ship canal, 

Committee. 

Chicago, September 12, 1900. 

There had been a couple of hundred people 
on the bridge over Deep Lock in Joliet when 
we passed beneath it, cheering us with the 
friendliest of good will; and an old dame 
pufifed laboriously down to the water's edge 
to ask if we were "them new-wed folks " and 
to toss us a copy of a local paper with our 
story In it. At Morris an aged countryman, 
sitting on the bank, whittling, had watched 
us with speculative eye as we approached, and 
as we came abreast had hailed us: 

'' Well, you got this far, ain't you? Haow 
d' ye like it so far?" 

The jolly woman who tended Lock Twelve 
called us her "children" when we arrived, 
and her " chickens " when we had been there 
ten minutes. And at La Salle, on that Sun- 

38 



ADRIFT AT LAST 

day night when we sat by our table poring 
for the hundredth time over the map of the 
Illinois and writing up our journals, there 
came a cheery hail from the bank, with all the 
deep sonorousness of a voice from the vasty 
deep. 

" Hello, on board The Honeymoon! " it said. 

He might have been a bo'sun from that 
same deep — the huge, blue-suited sailor who 
came aboard when I opened the door. His 
face was tanned, his hands were big and red, 
there were tatooed illustrations of marine life 
upon his wrists, and he hitched himself along 
as if he were a seaman of the good ship Pina- 
fore. He bobbed his head and touched his 
forelock in comic-opera style, till Janet began 
to hum to herself " In spite of all temptations 
to belong to other nations. . . ." 

But there was no English about our visi- 
tor. He cast an eye of approval about the in- 
terior of our cabin, hauled a chair into easy 
proximity, stretched himself in it, let his eye 
rove about the room again, and nodded, 

" Now," said he, " this is what I call ship- 
shape. This is right nautical, and correct. I 

39 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

heard tell all about you young folks and what 
your name is, — though it gets away from me 
this minute, — and so I says to myself: ' Them 
young folks,' I says, ' is going down into a part 
of the world that is strange to them but fa- 
miliar to me. Out of my store of learning,' I 
says, ' I will take aboard of 'em, when they 
come along, enough to help 'em out when they 
strikes some difficulties they ain't expecting.' " 

" That 's very kind of you," said we. 

'' Oho," said he, right heartily. " That ain't 
being kind. Now when I want to set out and 
be real kind to folks — but pass that by. This 
is just what you might call a neighborly visit, 
being as I 'm moored right next to you here in 
the Pool. I 'm aboard of that big New York 
yacht that come in behind you, piloting her 
down to New Orleans. I 'm the Sturgeon 
King, that 's who I am. Everybody on the 
river knows me, on account of the number of 
sturgeon I 've captured. Fishing is my busi- 
ness. Piloting I do just to oblige folks. But 
there — that ain't what I come aboard for. I 
come to tell you about the river. How much 
do you know about it? " 

40 



ADRIFT AT LAST 

" Nothing at all," said we. 

" Well, that 's good. That 's good. Some 
young folks thinks they knows it all. I see 
you got a good stout boat here — had some- 
one to help you that knowed the river, that 's 
sure. Now in the first place, I 'm going 
to — " 

He cast an eye aloft and gazed for a mo- 
ment reflectively at the twelve-foot oars se- 
curely suspended from the carlines. 

" How d' ye cal'late to steer ? " he said, 
abruptly. 

" Don't reckon to steer," I answered, 
promptly. '' Can't steer a drifting boat, you 
know." 

He nodded approvingly. " Learned that, 
have ye ? That 's a good starter. Most folks 
seems to want a rudder and wheel in their 
drifters. What's them oars for?" 

" Getting in and out of the current," said 
I, " and making landings." 

" What you going to do when the wind 's 
across the channel?" 

'' Stay on the bank." 

** What about head winds ? " 
41 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

" If they are n't too strong I reckon we '11 
hitch on to Charles WilHam Albright." 

I had been saving that last remark for an 
eye-opener for our visitor, and it was one. He 
had been tilted back in his chair, his eyes 
wandering about the cabin, his attention but 
indifferent. But at the sound of those three 
potent words — " Charles William Albright " 
— his chair legs slammed down to the floor, 
his mouth shut sharply, his eyes fixed me. 

*' Read it! Ain't you! " he ejaculated. 

" Time and again," said we, in unison. 

" Now ain't it the best book ever written? " 
he demanded. " Say, you folks will get along- 
all right. I see that. Anyone who comes 
down here with that book in stock can't go 
far wrong on the Mississippi." 

There may be among my readers those to 
whom the name of Charles William Albright 
conveys no such subtle understanding as it 
did to the Sturgeon King — but such are not 
of the Free Brotherhood of Lovers of the 
Mississippi. When Mark Twain had strug- 
gled some five or six years upon Huckleberry 
Finn's adventures and had not yet completed 

42 



ADRIFT AT LAST 

that labor of love, he went on a " reminiscing " 
journey down the Great Water, and put his 
old memories and his new adventures into a 
volume of rambling anecdotes and more or 
less inaccurate information called *' Life on 
the Mississippi." He ran Huck into the new 
volume, too, and gave him an adventure aboard 
a timber raft, which had become hoodooed by 
a mysterious barrel. This barrel drifted for 
days in the wake of the raft, and overtook it 
nightly, bringing thunderstorms and sudden 
death with it each time, until a determined 
raftsman hauled it aboard and opened it. He 
found in it the body of Charles William Al- 
bright, the murdered offspring of one of the 
raftsmen, and the latter thereupon, if memory 
serves me, jumped overboard and drowned. 
Huck was not upon the ill-fated raft, but upon 
another on which the tale was being told. He 
had swum aboard to gather information, and 
being found in his place of concealment and 
hauled naked into the firelight and asked his 
name, replied without hesitation, " Charles 
William Albright." 

One of the characteristic features of the 
43 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

missing barrel had been its ability to drift 
faster than anything else on the river. So of 
course when I " named it " to the Sturgeon 
King, I meant, in a general way, that we 
would fasten a line to some deep-sunk log or 
other drifting thing which would go ahead in 
spite of the wind, and would help tow us along. 
That, in fact, we did all the way down the 
river, to good advantage. But I meant a 
world more than that, and the old chap under- 
stood me — that we were following Mark 
Twain as a guide to his ancient haunt, and 
that when storms drove us to the bank we 
would act upon the example of Huckleberry 
Finn, and enjoy life investigating the idiosyn- 
cracies of folks " in Arkansas." 

We could not have hit upon a happier ap- 
peal to the old river man. " Life on the Mis- 
sissippi " was gospel to him. He knew its 
every page and anecdote, and was, I do not 
doubt, in the habit of passing as his own, the 
adventures and the information in it upon 
unread acquaintances. It put him on a new 
footing with us. He inquired if we had a 
good map, and when we produced Colonel Oc- 

44 



ADRIFT AT LAST 

kerson's excellent charts o£ the river, he went 
over them with us, page by page, indicating 
whirlpools that we must look out for; chutes 
that were safe at certain stages; towns where 
we could find good supplies; and other inter- 
esting information. He told us where to fish 
for the best catfish, and how, where to get 
geese and ducks easiest — which we never did ; 
how always to have good water by carrying 
a keg ashore every night, filling it and letting 
it settle (with a little corn meal on top of it 
to help the settling), and in the morning de- 
canting the clear water into another vessel 
and bringing it aboard — and how to cure the 
efifects of it by drinking pepper sauce! He 
told us the best places to tie up, and indicated 
ways of doing it. He advised us always to 
anchor, when we could, so as to be away from 
the bank, and to anchor under the lower side 
of a bar when we could — which we never did, 
because we had not then and never acquired 
an anchor; though we soon found his advice 
very good. We had expected to travel but ten 
or fifteen miles a day, but he gladdened our 
ears with the assurance that on fair travel- 

45 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

ing days we would make from thirty to 
forty. 

" Look out for caving banks," was his re- 
peated instruction, which I gladly hand on to 
any who may be tempted to follow in our 
wake. *' A steep bank that shows signs of 
having shifted recently is apt to cave or fall 
in at any moment. One night I tied up to 
one, not knowing any better, and in the middle 
of the night several tons of sand came down 
on one side of my boat. If it had been as 
small as yours we would have gone to the 
bottom. As it was we just escaped." 

I had that advice later from Captain M. M. 
Patrick, in his office at the Mississippi River 
Commission in St. Louis, and found it very 
necessary for a stranger on the river. And 
when we were all stocked up and our chart 
thoroughly annotated, the Sturgeon King 
settled back in his steamer chair, and for 
hour after hour until the dark middle of the 
night rattled out anecdotes of the adventures 
of those who had come, as we were coming, 
down to the Great Water, knowing nothing 
of it. Weird were the tales, but vastly amus- 

46 



ADRIFT AT LAST 

ing, and at the conclusion of each the old 
man settled deeper into his chair and chuckled 
till the whole boat shook with his jolly good 
humor. He ambled away at midnight and we 
never saw him again ; but we never think back 
to the river or begin to recount our wanderings 
upon it, that we do not soon stumble upon some 
reference to the Sturgeon King. 

They are jolly references now — memories 
of " Hennery B." and the widow who pursued 
and caught him ; of " Pa and Beck," of 
" Smokin' Johnnies," and of shanty-boaters 
at Peoria, who " would steal the Lord's Sup- 
per and come back after the table-cloth." 
But on that delightfully peaceful Monday 
evening when, as the sun went down, I poled 
the Easy Way through the last little reach 
of canal from the Pool to the Illinois itself, 
they were memories of advice and suggestion, 
and of forewarnings as to the probable be- 
havior of our vessel when it should be current- 
borne at last. Even with all that advice it was 
with considerable trepidation that we came to 
the plunge, and skimming close in to the up- 
stream side of the canal in order to escape 

47 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

being dashed on the lower, — " dashed " being 
a word we used before we had experienced 
the current of the IlHnois, — we suddenly 
perceived, without any forewarning jerk or 
thrill, that while the Easy Way apparently 
stood still upon the glassy surface of the 
water, the trees on the opposite bank were 
stalking slowly upstream, those upon the bank 
more rapidly, those at a distance more slowly, 
so that the whole grove had a twisting mo- 
tion, continually foreshortening the front ranks 
at the expense of the more distant — by which 
we knew that our house boat was at last adrift 
upon a flowing river. 

The Illinois here was not a wide stream, 
perhaps one hundred yards across, if memory 
serves me right; perhaps it was more. It 
was at a fair stage of water, so that the bank 
of the bottomland opposite, tree-covered and 
grassy, was but four or five feet above the 
water, and the intervening slope appeared 
from our side of the stream a grassy and in- 
viting bank. On the right was the abrupt 
hillside of the two cities. La Salle and Peru, 
and, nearer, the stone revetment of the river- 

48 



ADRIFT AT LAST 

bend. And in between was a ribbon of water 
without a flaw, with scarcely an eddy, with- 
out an audible murmur, with an appearance 
so peaceful, so trustworthy, so enticing, as to 
seem the natural habitat of honeymooners, 
given over entirely to thoughts not connected 
with the world about them. 

I took in the pike pole and laid it down 
upon the roof within easy reach. Janet, who 
was beginning supper preparations, came out 
on deck, and we stood there in silence, watch- 
ing La Salle drift back of us, and Peru begin 
to loom up ahead, while directly downstream 
from us enlarged the twinkling red lights of 
a big drawbridge. The current had swung 
us in close to the right-hand bank, which was 
the outside of a bend; to our delight and 
amazement it did not thrust us ashore, but 
kept us floating just out of reach of the rocks. 
The sun was quite hidden, the light was fail- 
ing, the sky was still gorgeously colored, and 
twinkling glows were appearing upon the hill- 
sides above us. In the cabin the tea-kettle 
sang noisily upon the stove. But on deck 
we two were the most peaceful, the most con- 

49 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

tented, the most relaxed objects in the whole 
scene. It seemed that all the toil, all the 
worry of the canal towing, which during the 
last days had grown irksome, was over now, 
and that we had nothing more difficult ahead 
of us than to float thus, in absolute inertia, 
down a gentle river to the sea. 



50 



CHAPTER ly 

THE ILLINOIS 

I DO not wonder that the old French voyageurs 
loved the Illinois, and risked their lives and 
their fortunes gladly to visit and to dwell by 
it. The fascination that it had for La Salle, 
for Tonti, for Joliet, for Marquette, and for 
the countless coureurs du hois who frequented 
this trail to the southwest, still lies upon it, 
waiting. Its clear water, its gentle current, its 
fretless channel, its green-clad, bordering hill- 
sides, its fabulous grain-fields, its forests, — 
so deep that they seem impenetrable and un- 
inhabited, — conspire to weave about the drift- 
ing traveler a spell which he is as loath as 
he is powerless to break. It combines in a 
peculiar way the brisk effectiveness of the 
North with the languorous charm of the South ; 
for its borders are rich with the soft greens, 
and promising with the well-tilled prosperity 

51 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

of the North, while the river itself opens to 
the Southland, yielding its fruits and taking 
its rewards from that region. The steam- 
boats which ply its waters come not down 
from Chicago, but up from St. Louis, and 
bring exchanges from Memphis and New 
Orleans for the corn and cattle and lumber 
of the Illinois. The fish that are in it — the 
cat, the buffalo, the carp — are those of its 
southern associates, not of its northern neigh- 
bors. Its water may come from the cold, 
clear depths of Lake Michigan, but it is trans- 
formed speedily by the alchemy of associa- 
tion and destiny into the appealing warmth 
and gentleness of a southern stream. And 
so powerfully is this influence exerted upon 
all who come within its reach, that one may 
see hardly a mile of the river bank to which 
is not moored one, sometimes many, such 
floating homes as this in which we traveled — 
the occupants of which had yielded to the 
seduction and had become children of the 
great river; slaves of it, rather, gladly serv- 
ing it. 

Yet though they wander up and down the 
52 



THE ILLINOIS 

stream, they are not true vagabonds; physi- 
cally footloose they are mentally bound. In 
their river estate they are as provincial as 
any New Yorker, or as any New England 
villager. They are in fact water gypsies. 
Later on we came to know many of them 
well, and traveled considerable distances 
with them. Those were the genuine free- 
lances, the real river men, the representa- 
tives of those who in an earlier epoch were 
canoe voyagers and trappers, then flat and 
keel boatmen, then rafters in the great days 
of log and lumber rafting, and who on the 
passing of their chosen vocations themselves 
passed to the decks of steamboats, or, in love 
of freedom, built floating cabins for themselves 
and created the new class of " shanty-boaters." 
Moored to the banks of the river in shel- 
tered nooks and eddies where the prevailing 
winds could not blow too heavily upon them, 
or preferably hidden almost entirely from 
sight in the mouth of some creek or bayou, 
the dwellings of these water gypsies were as 
impatient of stability as their owners them- 
selves. Bobbing up and down on the lightest 

53 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

waves, tossing their heads impudently to the 
passing steamboats, tugging at their leash- 
lines with ill-concealed eagerness to be off, 
they awaited only the moment when these 
lines should be loosed from the pegs or tree- 
trunks to which they were fast, before slip- 
ping happily away with the ever-ready cur- 
rent. For most of the gypsies, too, livelihood 
was as easily shifted as home. The great 
bulk of these shanty-boaters whom we met 
upon the Illinois were by profession fishermen ; 
they possessed — and in the amount of this 
one possession ranked their wealth and posi- 
tion — more or fewer hoops, large and small, 
heavily tarred, and connected in series, as 
distenders, in great bags of netting. These 
hoop-nets are called " fikes." The owner of 
them, having selected a favoring place in the 
river bank, runs out from shore a long line 
of stakes, driven each perpendicularly into the 
bottom, standing some distance above high 
water; and between these weaves a barrier 
of branches or, more commonly and more 
usefully, strings along them a barrier of net- 
ting. This " leader " turns in the fish which 

54 



THE ILLINOIS 

come against it. This fike-netting industry 
on the upper part of the Illinois was a gift 
of the city of Chicago to the valley, its flow 
from the lake giving a clear sweet river in 
this upper portion, of greater and steadier 
depth, and of such a quality that where even 
catfish had not been able to live in any quan- 
tity, now silver perch, carp and even fine large 
bass abound in increasing numbers. 

There were, of course, other industries — 
and lacks of industries — among these shanty- 
boat people. There was at Spring Valley, for 
instance, a boat of which the proprietor sent 
his two daughters to call upon us, to spy out 
the land and determine whether the keg upon 
our forward deck — acquired after the Stur- 
geon King's advice about settling river water 
— might not portend that we were rivals in 
keeping an illicit bar. 

There was something the matter with these 
women, but what it was Janet could not for 
a time puzzle out. At last one of them de- 
manded, coyly, " how many states " she had 
been in. 

" I Ve been in h-h-three," she hiccougheH, 
55 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

and Janet discovered that she was even then 
in a fourth. 

" The Rex '11 git you ef you ain't keerful," 
had been our last warning from the Sturgeon 
King, shouted after us as I sculled the Easy 
Way slowly out of the Canal Basin into the 
Illinois river. Janet, who had temporarily 
abandoned culinary operations to view from 
the roof our entrance upon the terrible stream, 
promptly paraphrased one of Riley's lines and 
sang with a merry refrain: 

" And the Rexy-boat '11 git you ef you don't watch 
out." 

As we look back on those early days of 
river travel it seems absurd that anyone could 
have been so lamentably ignorant of the char- 
acteristics of rivers as we then were. Turned 
loose on a river to-day, we pick out the channel 
by instinct, as we learned to do on the Missis: 
sippi. But the Illinois to us was all " Illinois." 
Anywhere on it we expected to go as fast 
as anywhere else on it. We thought of the 
river as of a ribbon of water from bank to 
bank moving uniformly downstream. We had 

56 



THE ILLINOIS 

not learned that " channel " and " swiftwater " 
are practically synonymous terms, and that out 
of the magical groove they describe one is 
almost as apt to go upstream as down. When 
the first island confronted us we went down 
the chute behind it. 

A night of mystery was that, the Easy Way 
going into odd little places we could not see. 
The chute was narrow, winding, clogged with 
logs and almost without current. I reached 
the bottom of the river with an oar and poled 
us along. Now and then a fallen tree im- 
peded us and we felt our way around it. 
Sometimes a log was just deep enough under 
water for us to pass over it. We could see 
but the loom of the woods on each bank; 
nothing more, except the water where the light 
of our cabin lamp fell on it. I had a lantern 
on the roof for a time, but took it in, as it 
blinded me. And so, not knowing where we 
were or whither going, we had our first ex- 
perience of the real troubles of running by 
night. 

" And the Rexy-boat '11 git you ef you don't 
watch out," Janet sang again after supper, 

57 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

and it was partly fear of that terrible steam- 
boat, which in those days ruled the waters of the 
upper Illinois, which sent us down this chute. 
The Rex had a famous reputation for waves 
among canal people at La Salle, and as it would 
come up river at midnight and go back again 
at daybreak, we must be on the lookout against 
shipwreck. 

About midnight, as we came out of the chute, 
a peculiar rustling sound, which grew stead- 
ily louder, was heard. Through it came the 
"fluff-fluff-fluff" of a steamboat's paddle- 
wheel beating the water. We stood on the 
deck watching, and there in midstream came a 
steamboat, brilliant from stem to stern with in- 
candescent lights, with two arc lights over the 
forward deck, and with a searchlight stream- 
ing from the hurricane. It was the Rex. We 
clung to the eaves and waited for the terrible 
swells. The rustling came nearer and nearer 
as they broke on the bank below us. Then 
came a premonitory shiver, and the Easy Way 
bobbed its head, rose and fell, rose and fell, 
easily, on three or four tiny waves, a foot or so 
in height, which did not even slap the under- 

58 



THE ILLINOIS 

side of our overhanging deck as we bobbed 
to meet them. We waited tensely for some- 
thing worse to follow but nothing came. 

I have spoken of the water-barrel which we 
had on the forward deck. Later, as we drifted 
out of the canal, a keg bobbed against us, and 
looking to the day when it might come handy, 
we took it also on deck. With the two orna- 
menting our '' front porch " we had quite the 
appearance of a water-borne saloon. One 
morning on the Illinois we lay late at a moor- 
ing. I was chopping wood on the bank along- 
side and Janet was busy within when a cum- 
bersome old Teuton lumbered up the shore and 
halted at our gang plank. The barrel and keg 
caught his eye. 

" Herr Gott ! " he ejaculated, heaving a 
mighty sigh. " Dot is fine now. You got dot 
beer, eh ? " and he started up the plank. 

" Hold on," said I ; " keep off that boat." 

"Keep off?" he demanded in surprise; 
"Vat for?" 

" Private house. Keep out! " I said. 

He looked at me in amazement. " Private 
house, eh? You ain't von of dem bumboats? 

59 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

You ain't got some beer on board? Den vat 
for you got dose kegs, hey?" 

It took some persuasion to induce the old 
chap to go away, but at last he did go, con- 
vinced not that we were not a " bumboat," 
but that we did not want his trade. 

Janet baked her first bread on the Illinois, 
and the resultant tragedy is worth recording. 
It was also the first attempt at baking in Bar- 
nacle's second-hand stove. Put together and 
kneaded according to instructions and with 
the greatest care, it rose, as handsome a 
sponge as one would want to see. But we had 
not then discovered that we could not heat the 
bottom of the oven. When the bread had been 
in three quarters of an hour the top was de- 
liciously brown — but we found the bottom 
pasty and uncooked. 

''What shall I do?" demanded Janet. 

"Do?" said I. "Nothing simpler. Turn 
the loaves bottom side up and bake it another 
hour." 

So she did, that being the only way to get 
results. When it was thus doubly browned 
she drew out the squatty loaves, and looked 

60 



THE ILLINOIS 

for a place to lay them while she was cooking 
supper and setting the table. The cabin was 
small, the shelves full, the table busy, the 
trunk occupied, the stove hot; there was but 
one place, — the foot of the bed. Carefully 
she rolled them in a red tablecloth and put 
them there. 

Just at this moment I discovered something 
funny and came in to tell it. The chairs 
were occupied; as I have said, the stove was 
hot. I sat upon the foot of the bed. The 
narrative was progressing finely when the 
heat suddenly attracted my attention. 

" Say! " I exclaimed; " what 's hot here? " 

"My bread! My bread!" wailed Janet, 
and unrolled a crushed corpse from the red 
tablecloth. 

Her grief over the loss of the bread, which 
was mashed beyond redemption, was too ob- 
vious. I felt certain that she was tremen- 
dously relieved that we would not be obliged 
to eat it. She dried it and rolled the whole 
ill-fated batch into crumbs. 

She turned the laugh on me a few days 
later when, in a slack part of the river, I 

6i 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

thrust an oar down aft against the bottom, 
threw niy weight upon it for a heavy lunge, 
and as it sHpped from under me floundered 
off the deck into five feet of water. Janet, 
who had just come on deck, was overcome 
with a gale of laughter and refused to offer 
assistance. She added insult to injury, and 
when, at the next landing, we went to the 
general store and postoffice, she sent off post- 
als to her friends inscribed merely '' John fell 
overboard." Even this was not enough, for 
she forgot to address one of them in her hurry, 
and dragged me back to the postoffice to re- 
pair the omission. We found the postmaster 
in a broad grin, reading them all, and his grin 
gave way to guffaws as he selected the one 
without an address to hand back to us. 

For the Easy Way the current of the Illinois 
provided a progress of perhaps ten or twelve 
miles a day when there was no wind to hold 
us back. Five miles we were always grateful 
for. We were often glad to have done three. 
And once when funds ran short and all our 
mail was mistakenly sent to Beardstown in- 
stead of Havana, we settled down to it, and 

62 




Pulled up for the winter. A shant}'-boat on the bank 



THE ILLINOIS 

accomplished twenty miles in a single 
run. 

At Beardstown I hastened to the postoffice, 
leaving Janet in the cabin. Two men strolled 
down to the river bank, close by, and began 
slowly to put a new handle in an axe that had 
been lying there — the task requiring appar- 
ently all the skill of both of them. One of 
them gradually stopped working and addressed 
the other, regardless of the listening feminine 
ears. 

" Bill," he said, " where 's your ol' woman? " 

Bill also stopped, and considered. 

" My ol' woman ? Oh, — you mean Sal ! 
Why, she ain't my ol' woman no more. She 
taken a great shine to Jake, and him to her. 
I see how things was comin' out, so I just 
traded her off to Jake for them gum boots 
I got in the cabin and a rifle I sold to Hank 
Busby." 

I had not rigged my sweeps up when we 
left Chicago, but had an oarlock on the after 
deck. Standing on the narrow deck with the 
twelve-foot oar straight down in the water 
half its length, I sculled, when the wind blew, 

63 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

to hold the boat with the current. Sometimes 
in pure joy of the exercise and of getting 
ahead, I sculled half the day, so that we went 
faster than the current — but never so fast 
that we could not run to the bank whenever 
we would, to see whatever was of interest 
to us. 

Passing through the great locks of the river, 
the Easy Way appeared a tiny thing for which 
to swing the heavy machinery. But as we went 
along the way the lock-keepers, like the steam- 
boat men, the shore folks and the water gyp- 
sies, all seemed to find pleasure in courtesy 
to us, and we of the Easy Way rejoiced in a 
kindliness which, as lovers ourselves, we could 
return and appreciate. 



64 



CHAPTER V 

SOME CAREFREE TRAVELING 

The little god who sits up aloft looking out 
for the interests of Jacky must have had more 
than an occasional eye out for wandering 
honeymooners during that month of October. 
Otherwise the carelessness with which we navi- 
gated, the disregard of most elementary rules 
for safety, must surely have brought us disas- 
ter instead of leading, as it did, to the hap- 
piest of results. There was, for example, that 
misty night upon which we entered Peoria 
lake — Lake Crevecoeur, of La Salle — and 
left our fogbound home to find its own way 
to some mysterious shore. 

It was mid-afternoon when I slipped the 
mooring lines of the Easy Way at the quaint old 
town of Chillicothe, and on a placid, unruffled 
river, drifted away downstream and around a 
bend into the entrance of the lake. Blackbirds 

65 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

were migrating and along the riverside were 
thousands of them, great flocks, often deafen- 
ing us with their shrill chatter as they swooped 
over our heads in their trial flights. Sunday 
picknickers in canoes and motor-boats, idled 
along the shaded border of the stream. As the 
afternoon waned and the Easy Way drifted 
more and more slowly, these accompany- 
ing pleasure-seekers turned shoreward. The 
blackbirds went to roost; the shores, growing 
more and more distant, became less and less dis- 
tinct ; and at last, when we came back to earth 
from some blissful imaginings, we were well out 
into the upper end of Peoria lake, with little or 
no current to move us, and the shores were out 
of sight. 

Had we been less certain that no harm was 
coming to us on the Illinois our plight at that 
time might have worried us; but we were ap- 
parently under a charm. A very gentle breeze 
had sprung up unperceived, and when the 
twinkling stars gave us our direction I deter- 
mined that it was blowing downstream and 
was helping us on our way. A few minutes 
later a rising mist hid the stars and the water 

66 



SOME CAREFREE TRAVELING 

about us, and thenceforth we rode unseeing 
and unseen. 

It had been our plan to stop next day at the 
little village of Spring Bay, on the east shore 
of the lake, for supplies and for fresh well- 
water. Spring Bay was some miles ahead of 
us in an unknown direction. There were no 
steamboats due either up or down, and so far 
as we knew we were the only creatures des- 
tined to spend that night on Peoria lake. It 
was a situation novel but too unexpected to 
seem anything but natural. We ate our sup- 
per in delicious contentment; then, warmly 
wrapped, mounted to the roof and endeavored 
to keep nautical watch through the fog. Find- 
ing that profitless, we set a lantern upon the 
roof to warn others of our whereabouts, and 
retired to the cabin to read aloud; and at 
midnight, being still adrift and still lost, went 
fretlessly to sleep, leaving the Easy Way to 
find her path, and the lantern to mark our 
place. 

It was just daybreak when a slight bump 
against our hull aroused me. Remembering 
how I had left the boat, I hurried to the deck. 

67 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

The morning was clear and bright, the fog 
had entirely disappeared, the breeze was barely 
stirring, and the Easy Way — oh, most won- 
derful of heaven-guided craft — lay with her 
bow gently scraping the steamboat landing of 
Spring Bay, at the end of a long causeway 
which jutted from the village into the lake. 

Despite its natural beauty, Peoria lake is 
the hcte noir of the river drifter, — the Creve- 
cceur indeed, — for it is almost entirely with- 
out current, and forms an eighteen-mile bar- 
rier past which the shanty-boater must row or 
pole his vessel in those rare days when there 
is no trace of wind opposing him. Yet it is 
one of the most beautiful lakes in Illinois, or 
in the middle west, — a long, narrow and 
irregular water, dotted with islands, sur- 
rounded by broad, level and fabulously fertile 
fields, green with corn in the spring and with 
wheat in the winter, and overlooked by tower- 
ing cliffs and tumbling hills higher than are 
to be found at any other point along the 
river. 

The slow stages by which we maSe our way 
through the lake were destined each to be 

68 



SOME CAREFREE TRAVELING 

marked by some adventure. Money was scarce 
those days. Stories had gone back to the 
newspapers, but whether printed or not we 
had no means of knowing. As the larder 
diminished and the work increased, Janet rose 
bravely to every occasion, and when we moored 
on a windy morning at Mossville, emulating 
the example of a neighboring drifter, she got 
out tub and soap and began for the first time 
in her life to launder the family wash. Hour 
after hour she toiled at it, with aching back 
and increasing weariness, until a row of snowy 
linen and other less snowy but no less clean 
articles decorated the shrubbery on the bank. 
It was the first washing, and I think the last, 
— owing to a difiference of opinion, in which 
the man of the house finally triumphed. 

Another day we lay at Prospect Point, and 
leaving the boat there, went by foot and 
by trolley to Peoria. Fortunate event! In 
a news-stand we found our paper — and our 
stories in it; and in the postoffice our first 
check. 

We found shelter at last in a nook by the 
pumping station at Tonti, where a point of 

69 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

willows screened us from the wind, and lay 
there a couple of days waiting for an oppor- 
tunity to progress — meantime making daily 
excursions into the city. 

There was a " Corn Carnival " in progress 
in the city, — an annual festival of the har- 
vest, which was vastly beguiling. The fair 
grounds, with their sideshows, were crowded 
with city folks and with farmers " jes' a-rub- 
berin'," as one of them told us. The streets 
of Cairo and all the old-time shows were on 
hand. And up and down the thoroughfares 
were cane games, nigger-heads, medicine 
fakers, and, continually at work, an interest- 
ing charlatan, who claimed to be giving away, 
at the special request of Mr. Thomas A. Edi- 
son, ear-rings and other ornaments of the new 
metal " elecktron " with every cake of soap 
he sold for a quarter. 

" Tickler, tickler, git yer come-back-tickler," 
was a cry that resounded continuously, and 
after nightfall the young folks went down the 
streets armed with these strange affairs, which 
thrust out suddenly, tickled the ear of a startled 
passer-by, and returned to the case in the pro- 

70 



SOME CAREFREE TRAVELING 

prietor's hand before the tickled one could turn 
around. Confetti was everywhere, and merri- 
ment reigned till the small hours. 

One night when we returned from this fes- 
tival to our mooring at Tonti we were wak- 
ened by a terrific gale which lashed the lake 
to fury and drove torrents of rain before it; 
and soon discovered that the whole force of 
the wind was directly toward the Narrows, our 
exit from the lake. It was too good an op- 
portunity to lose even at the risk involved in 
running at night in such a storm. I hauled 
in the lines and shoved the boat from shore. 
The little Easy Way, unused to such rough 
traveling, careened far over before the wind, 
then, as she felt the waves in full force, rolled 
and pitched frightfully on them; but never- 
theless traveled, broadside, at such rate as she 
had never traveled before, straight in the 
direction she should go. By three o'clock in 
the morning, or perhaps a little earlier, I put 
out the sweeps and rounded to under the pro- 
tection of the point at the Narrows, in a quiet 
nook, satisfied that a clear way lay before us. 
Two nights later, when there was no wind at 

71 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

all, we got under way at sundown, drifted 
slowly down till we felt the increasing current 
of the outlet, and in a darkness so intense 
that we could see nothing around us but the 
looming red lights of the drawbridge ahead, 
went swiftly out of the lake, through the draw 
into the river, and in a deepening fog tied up 
to wait for daylight. 

Our methods of navigation at this time were, 
in fact, as inexcusable as one of Mr. Henry 
James's sentences. We started in the morning, 
as he does, with the best of intentions; but 
as the day wore on, wandered into devious 
channels without reason and without restraint. 
The setting of the sun was no ending of the 
day to us; for, if we felt so inclined, we 
drifted to the shore, threw a line over the pro- 
jecting limb of a willow tree, or carried it in- 
land to the trunk, and so lay with the hull of 
our vessel against the bank till the crack of 
dawn; or, as was more apt to be the case, let 
the sun and daylight go whither they listed, and 
floated in darkness at the river's convenience 
down the gentle pathway of the stream. So 
it was we went through No Man's Land, hav- 

72 



SOME CAREFREE TRAVELING 

ing locked through Copperas Creek in the late 
afternoon, and coming into the almost impene- 
trable fastnesses of the great swamp at dusk. 
Not far ahead of us, when darkness settled, 
a light twinkled oddly under the gloom of the 
overhanging woods. We speculated on it, 
watching it from our deck as we drew down 
on it, and found, when we were at last abreast, 
that it was the eye of a searchlight, held by 
a fisherman in a dugout skiff, who drifted 
slowly along under the bank with a dip net in 
his other hand, and frequently scooped up im- 
mense frogs which sat on the edge of the 
shore, fascinated by the glare. Later even 
this light was lost to us, and in absolute black- 
ness we drifted on. The Easy Way wended 
her own gait again, while we played parchesi 
on the cabin table, or read aloud. In the deep 
woods on either side were numbers of great 
hoot-owls, whose mellow notes — among the 
most musical sounds in nature — boomed al- 
most without interruption, — " who-who-, 
who-whoooo, who-who, who-who-o-o-o-o- 
000," — the last sound dying away in a sub- 
terranean chuckle which neither the typewriter 

73 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

nor the human voice can imitate. Near and 
far among the fastnesses, too, were countless 
screech-owls, whose shrill treble trills, so often 
described as weird and ghastly, seemed to us 
rather friendly and companionable, hailing 
sounds of friends in this enveloping dark. As 
we came down toward the middle of the night, 
— for as we look back upon this part of the 
Illinois it seems to us almost to be banded 
in black-and-white strips, according as we 
traveled through them, by day or by night, 
and each location has its place, not in a county 
or a bend but in a noontime or a midnight, — 
far ahead of us we heard the intermittent 
baying of a dog. It was now to the left of 
us, now to the right, as the river twisted, and 
sometimes right ahead ; and as it grew plainer 
we heard, in the intermissions of it, its echo, 
winding back and forth among the river- 
bends. When at last we were in the same 
reach of river with it and with the dog who 
stood upon the bank baying, we solved what 
had appeared a mystery. For the dog was 
baying to the echo in sheer loneliness; stand- 
ing silent to listen while the farthest, faintest 

74 



SOME CAREFREE TRAVELING 

repetition of his voice was to be heard; then, 
the instant it had vanished, breaking out again 
into a swift succession of bays which he halted 
as the first tone came back from the opposite 
woods. We were an hour or more coming 
down upon him, and another hour within hear- 
ing when we had passed — and we think back 
still to that swamp in the middle of No Man's 
Land as to a place where stands eternally a 
dog, baying to the echoes, making the night 
musical or hideous, according as the ear of 
the listener is opened for the sounds that may 
come to him, or only for the accustomed notes 
of civilization. When it was gone we slept 
at last, I arising now and again to find how the 
boat did, and often having to go on deck and 
pole her out of the clutches of a fike-netter's 
leader and set her again in the fair way of 
the current. 

Followed, some days later, our first day of 
actual sailing upon the Illinois, when, with a 
howling northeasterly gale dead aft, I set a 
square-sail upon a yard forward, and with the 
steering oar out of the after door laid my 
course before the wind for La Grange and the 

75 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

first federal dam. That was a day of strenu- 
ous labors, so that Janet fed me my breakfast 
while I clutched at the tiller and sheets; but 
the second day after, the seventeenth of Oc- 
tober, is marked in red in the Logbook of the 
£"0^3; Way, and in the memories of her crew, 
as the first of those memorable days when in 
sheer contentment we *' sat on the roof and 
sang." 

Oh, day of blessed memory! I have not 
space to tell in detail of the cool and quiet 
little chute down which we went to dodge the 
swells of the lower-river packet Bald Eagle; 
nor of the reds and browns of autumnal foli- 
age; nor of the feeling here again so strong 
with us of moving ourselves, home and all, 
bodily into the life of a new community as 
we tied up before the village of Naples and 
went ashore for mail. It was the afternoon 
which counted, and which counts yet, for the 
whole of that beautiful day. 

It was a still, soft, peaceful afternoon, 
dreamy and perfect. Now and then a breath 
of wind came gently to us, but barely strong 
enough to float the filmy threads on which 

76 



SOME CAREFREE TRAVELING 

black and gold spiders were traveling across 
the water. On the glassy surface of a fairy 
river idled the Easy Way unguided, unassisted. 
The gentle current had us in its keeping, and 
with no one to see that we were lovers, 
unafraid, we sat in our easy-chairs upon 
the roof, side by side, holding hands, like 
country sweethearts, and singing all the old 
songs we could remember. " Annie Laurie " 
and " Fair Harvard," snatches from " Oliv- 
ette " and from the *' Bohemian Girl," followed 
the " Flower Song " and many another from 
the old operas, and were echoed back to us 
from the woods on either side or from broad 
hills that rose beyond the broad bottomland 
fields just greening with winter wheat. 

Along the edge of the roof a dozen or more 
gossamer filaments had become attached, and 
as we drifted through the still air they 
streamed out in the sunlight astern like silken 
banners, more lovely than anything man can 
devise. We had come to nature and she had 
decorated us with these badges as her own. 
The sun traveled slowly down the western sky 
as we passed islands and rounded bends, al- 

77 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

ways borne by the scarce discernible current. 
We had no thought for the material things of 
the world then. We were in the land of the 
ideal, and neither supper-time nor sunset could 
call us out of it. 

It was Honeymoon Land, all this. The 
Managing Editor, to discourage us, had held 
out the theory that no man and woman, newly 
wedded and without lifelong habits together, 
could be, as we were, thus shut up together 
in a single cabin, away from our friends, and, 
at the end of a few weeks, remain on speak- 
ing terms. Our friends argued from the same 
point of view. Idle and insensate folks ! They 
knew not Janet. That same adaptability and 
resource which had enabled her to take Mac's 
Annie at her proper worth, to receive the 
Sturgeon King as an honored guest, and to 
remain courteous during the trying call of 
three drunken shanty-boat " ladies " spying us 
out, — the courage that made her turn to the 
hardest tasks without flinching, — all this and 
more would not show them the wonderful 
spirit, the comradeship, the equality in fellow- 
ship that my new wife developed as the days 

78 



SOME CAREFREE TRAVELING 

progressed. Fellowship and understanding — 
with them the prophecy of the Managing 
Editor — was wide of the mark. To us, who 
were making the trip, it seemed that every 
day thus spent together was a new bond ; each 
beautiful thought, each fine experience a new 
link between us. We were multiplying mo- 
mentarily the associations which, after all, in 
a friendship, as in the functions of a man's 
mind, knit the present to the past to make 
life enjoyable and companionship a source of 
happiness. 

This we were finding daily, and we were 
so to find it on the whole journey. Our lives 
ran as smoothly as, on such a day, the Easy 
Way drifted. And when there came incidents 
more abrupt, interruption to the easy progress, 
they were but instances to prove to each the 
dependability of the other. 

We each had our work to do, these days. 
In many ways the little cabin was more trouble 
for the housekeeper than a more ample home. 
To go from front to rear it was necessary to 
disturb its order by moving chairs out of the 
passage-way, which with chairs in it became 

79 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

the sitting-room. The kitchen table, cleared 
of dishes, became the library table. The trunks 
became sofas by virtue of their coverings. 
Mud from the river bank made sweeping 
necessary many times a day, and the use of 
roughly chopped wood from the shore gave 
more dirt entrance. 

There were days when I labored incessantly 
against the winds; and there were others 
when, unable to drift, we went for long walks 
to enjoy the country and to add to our store 
of mutual experiences. When we had passed 
Kampsville, and below the last dam found 
twenty miles of currentless river to be passed 
over, a real struggle began. The Mississippi 
was " up " and had backed into the Illinois. 
Progress could only be made by sculling and 
by taking advantage of favorable breezes. It 
was a swampy country. Ducks flew up out 
of the bushes within oar's length of us. But 
malarial mosquitoes flew up too, and one sunny 
morning found me stretched out with chills 
and fever. We were against the bank at a 
point where a causeway led across the swamp 
to the foot of the bluff two miles away. It 

80 



SOME CAREFREE TRAVELING 

was then that the burden fell heaviest on 
Janet. Unwilling to risk water from the 
stagnant river and determined that I should 
have good water and milk as well, she trudged 
two weary miles to a farm in the distant hills 
and brought the full pails back with her. It 
was not the first, nor was it the last, of the 
experiences which taught us to rely upon each 
other; but it remains unforgettable — one of 
those " taken- for-granted " things which add 
much to the happiness of later life. Times 
when wreck and death seemed imminent 
brought us into the closest partnership; and 
it seemed to me then, as it does to-day, that 
nothing I can ever do will adequately com- 
pensate for those miles of tramping under a 
hot sun, that aching back, those weary shoul- 
ders unaccustomed to such burden, that ex- 
pression of concern, yet of infinite tenderness 
as she returned. It was such welding that 
gave to our house-boat honeymoon the validity 
of almost a lifetime of experience. 

But fever and chills vanished before good 
nursing and a determination to get along. 
The stagnant twenty miles were at last over- 

8i 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

come. And on a Saturday, the last in Octo- 
ber, long after the sun had set and darkness 
had descended, we moored the Easy Way to 
the Illinois shore, where the morning light 
would show us the Mississippi. 



82 



CHAPTER VI 

THE MISSISSIPPI 

The Mississippi! The Great Water! For 
days the words have sung in our ears wak- 
ing and sleeping. Innumerable visions of the 
mighty flood have been conjured up, held 
place for an hour, and faded away, driven 
from the mind by some grander, more won- 
derful conception. In those last days upon 
the Illinois, days of constant toil in the cur- 
rentless backwater, of fever and illness from 
the stagnant, miasmatic overflow, the thought 
had ever buoyed us up that around but a few 
more bends we would come at last to the 
Mississippi. 

Twelve Mile and Nine Mile points were 
passed, and then each succeeding milepost on 
our map meant, not that much less labor to 
accomplish, that much more progress made, 
but rather so many moments less till we 

83 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

beheld with our bodily eyes that which our 
mental vision had depicted for us in so many 
guises. We spoke often of Marquette then, 
and in our eagerness shared, perhaps, the 
thoughts of that noble Jesuit as his canoe, 
strongly paddled, swept down through the 
last reaches of the Wisconsin toward the very 
stream we were now approaching. We pic- 
tured his standing with the trader Joliet upon 
the shore opposite the beautiful bluffs of Mc- 
Gregor gazing out upon the blue water, 
broken by dainty islets and fringed with emer- 
ald woodlands; standing there filled with un- 
utterable awe and happiness, seeking, seeking 
for some word, some phrase with which to 
describe it aptly, and at last choosing for it 
the most beautiful symbol of his faith and 
naming it " River of the Conception." 

So might we come to it, we thought; and 
when, on that Saturday night we moored the 
Easy Way long after dark in a little tunnel- 
like opening in the willows, at the village of 
Grafton, we were overjoyed that it was thus, 
in darkness, that we came to this place 
whence, next morning, we would look out upon 

84 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

Majesty with the sun rising above the hills 
at our back and investing with an added glory 
islet and wood and rocky bluff. We talked of 
it that evening in our cabin and, sleeping, 
dreamed of it. And in the morning at the 
crack of day we ran to the rear cabin door 
and threw it open and gazed eagerly, to 
see — 

Fog, white, impenetrable, and beside that 
nothing. The dripping walls of the Easy Way 
brushed gently on either side against the em- 
bracing willows, scarcely discernible even at 
so short a distance. Directly at the stern of 
the boat the gloomy water was visible, but a 
dozen feet away it faded into the whiteness 
of the mist. Through this blanket of vapor 
there came to us no murmur, no rippling, no 
sound of any sort to signify that flowing 
water was within a hundred miles of us. The 
penetrating, damp cold of the early morning, 
the white fog, the Easy Way and the em- 
bracing willows, these made up the world to 
us beyond which there was nothing known, 
nothing certain, only surmise, imagination, 
untried swift current, rocks, sandbars, — and 

85 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

farther and farther beyond, the Southland 
toward which we were impelled as strongly 
as the great river toward the Gulf. And with 
that recklessness which served us well upon the 
Illinois but which might have cost our lives 
on the larger river, I slipped our moorings 
from their stakes, pushed gently against the 
bank, and sent the Easy Way, with soft rub- 
bings and slappings against the willows, slowly 
out of the little shelter in which she lay, into 
the white unseen. 

It may have been an hour, perhaps a fourth 
that time, that I had been sculling away from 
what I believed to be the shore, when at last I 
drew in my oar and putting it on the deck gave 
over attempting to guide the vessel. The 
mist had lightened somewhat, but still con- 
cealed everything from our deck. Now and 
again there came to our ears faint musical 
gurgling as of waters eddying. We strained 
our eyes first this way and then that, not know- 
ing in which way lay the nearer shore and in 
which the Mississippi. Only we were cer- 
tain, so clear was the water about us, that 
we had not yet entered the more turbulent 

86 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

stream. At last Janet caught at my sleeve 
and pointed. I peered ahead anxiously. 
Dimly I saw that the waters swirled and ed- 
died but a rod away. Mingling with the clear 
green were murky brown patches, which 
seemed to break away from a more swiftly 
flowing body. The fog lifted slightly — and 
we saw. And after all our visions, of green 
isles, of towering bluffs, of sun-kissed ripples 
and green woods — this is all we saw ; a 
brownish-green surface, and at its edge, as 
we were swept across it, eddies bubbling and 
boiling, churning upward unceasingly, and 
carrying away to churn upward again swirls 
of water-borne sand. The mist still hung 
about us, and on every side was silence, but 
we three, my wife, the Easy Way and I, were 
moving swiftly through that white, clinging 
silence toward we knew not what. We had 
missed that Marquette-like glimpse of the 
Great Water from its shore — yet not Mar- 
quette himself ever voyaged more adven- 
turously than we, thus attempting our first 
cruise on the Mississippi in the morning 
fog. 

87 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

Yet, after all, nothing could have been more 
appropriate than this introduction to the Mis- 
sissippi. So long had it been our daily theme, 
so long had we wondered how it would ap- 
pear to us, so differently had we pictured it, 
as a thing of wonderful beauty and as a 
stormy and terrible monster, so often had we 
thought of the time when the idly drifting 
Easy Way should suddenly lurch and swing 
into the grasp of the Great Water and plunge 
at ungovernable pace into whirlpools, rock- 
dams, snags and sandbars, that no ordinary 
sight of the reality could have satisfied us. 
Hidden in this all-enwrapping fog, our illu- 
sions were preserved. We stood on the deck 
lost in the mist, and wondered and were de- 
lighted. We stood there and let the mystery 
and the greatness of it sink into us. We 
drank them deeply. This was what we had 
come to find. This was our first goal, the 
first sign of our real achievement. We had 
started on a trip down the Mississippi, and 
for weeks we had progressed but sluggishly; 
but at last here we were, on the very river. 
We had come to it ourselves, unaided. We 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

were in the midst of it, alone. Just how we 
would get ashore again, just what we would 
do out there — all that could be solved later. 
The thing was, we were on the Mississippi. 
To that extent we had achieved. 

Then the river began to come to us, to make 
itself known to us, gradually. As yet we saw 
only the brownish water around us; now and 
again blue sky overhead. Then, suddenly, as 
we stood there looking, we knew. We saw 
over the top of the mist. We could see over — 
over and beyond, to a church steeple, noth- 
ing more; a church steeple about a quarter 
of a mile away, and madly racing — or so it 
seemed to us, for it was going (in relation 
to the Easy Way) upstream at the rate of 
three miles an hour. It was an uncanny 
sight, and yet a welcome one. The river 
speed, too, was being gently broken to us. In 
a moment there were houses and stores; then 
a steamboat on the ways, being built upon 
the bank; then the rocky hills; then the mist 
burned away and we were passing Grafton; 
we were passing it rapidly; we were in the 
full swing of the Great Water, and it seemed 

89 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

to us as if we were traveling as fast as a 
railroad train. 

With equal suddenness disaster loomed 
ahead of us. We were bearing down, at this 
unwonted speed, upon a rocky promontory, 
which we were about to strike with a terri- 
ble blow. Though the Easy Way was built 
for hard use it was evident that if we struck 
those jagged rocks something would be hurt 
about the boat. I had had the current boards 
down, broad boards to grip the water deeply. 
Quickly I released them, and heading the boat 
offshore I began to scull as rapidly as I 
could, with half of the twelve-foot sweep in 
the water, turning and twisting as though my 
life depended on it. It was in vain. I could 
not check or sensibly lessen our approach to 
that dreaded ledge. Finding that we would 
strike it anyway I prepared to fend off. I 
quit sculling, and braced myself, pike pole in 
hand, to sustain the shock and if possible to 
save the hull. We drove in until I had al- 
most touched the rock, and then, without 
a jar, without a turn or any preliminary in- 
dication, the little house curved gently away 

90 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

and, following the purposeful current, swept 
past the rock and out again, off toward the 
Missouri shore. 

As we did not care to leave the Illinois 
shore, but had foolishly and in our ignorance 
made up our minds that we would stick to 
one side and not try to cross this dangerous 
river, I opposed this new movement by scull- 
ing in toward the bank. To my delight this 
now proved an easy thing to do, and I kept 
it up until, as we approached the shore, we 
ceased moving downstream and came to a 
stand — then slowly moved back up toward the 
rocky point and at last came to rest, in shal- 
low water, against a shelving bank. On the 
point was a white board with an arrow point- 
ing across the stream. There was also a 
light there. Had we but known it, this was 
a crossing, one of those places where the cur- 
rent, and with it the main channel, swings 
across from one shore to the other. But we 
were more concerned with another discovery. 
We had learned that on the Mississippi, for 
all its swift current, one can land without 
bumping, by coming into an eddy under a 

91 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

point and drifting to shore. This solve3 a 
problem which had often worried us. We 
took the opportunity to gather driftwood, and 
then set out again. 

To get the best of the drifting I set the 
current boards down four feet or so. They 
engaged a submerged dike before we had gone 
a mile. There were signs on the shore that 
said " dike " to pilots, and a perch at the 
outer end of it. It was one of those contrac- 
tion dikes with which the river engineer nar- 
rows and deepens the channel. We struck 
it while drifting over, careened our house, 
spilled the dishes from the table with much 
clatter, and frightened ourselves half to death. 
But nothing more serious resulted. 

Then, still in ignorance, we chose to go 
down behind an island on the Illinois side. As 
we came to the head of the chute we heard a 
roar, and suddenly swept over the top of an- 
other dike, or perhaps a reef, with about two 
inches to spare under our " keel ; " and at the 
foot of the island we ran over another. Little 
things like this, even to people who were igno- 
rant of the river, were hints to find the channel 

92 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

and stay in it. Nevertheless, we clung to the 
Illinois side more or less faithfully all day, pass- 
ing through the Alton rock dam in a gap that of- 
fered the only possible passing outside the 
channel, and finally fetching up at the levee, 
and landing in the very nose of an out-going 
steamboat. It was an arduous and a danger- 
ous day's work, which in the minds of our 
friends was the logical result of traveling on 
Sunday. For my part I felt justified in all 
the risk we ran, and that my wife did so too 
was evident when she said, with a deep sigh 
of relief : " Well, that fog has helped us to 
escape the Frenches." 

If I have not mentioned the French boys 
earlier it is not because they were not pres- 
ent in mind. We had many worries on the 
Illinois. But the whole impression which the 
river made on us was a peaceful and happy one. 

Among the other notes which Janet has set 
down upon the pages of the Log, there are four 
phrases, designating the four stages of the voy- 
age. On this page on which we emerge from 
the Illinois I find the words " A Journey in 
Serenity " and I know no better for describing 

93 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

it. The little troubles were but passing things. 
Only this of the Frenches bade fair to be serious. 
The two brothers were river men by choice 
every winter, lake seamen in summer. They 
had built a skiff near where the Easy Way 
was put together and had formed a plan to 
go down when we did, in order that they 
might get the benefit of our lockage through 
the canal and river and so save their tolls — 
a matter of about five dollars. 

We had little objection to the two men in 
themselves. They were big, rough, hearty 
fellows, though they looked like consummate 
villains. But as elements in a wedding jour- 
ney they were distinctly out of place. We had 
sentimental reasons against having them with 
us. To this they added artlessly by telling us 
that our boat was unscientifically arranged, and 
that when we got well under way they would 
come aboard and help me tear everything to 
pieces and put it together again in the way 
they said every river man had it done, with 
the kitchen at the front door and the bunk 
at the back, and with other changes. As soon 
as they got the boat fixed up they would come 

94 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

with us to board; my wife could as easily 
cook for four as for two,^ they said, and they 
would help me run the boat. They would 
tow theirs along for sleeping quarters and 
live on mine. 

That was a *' huckleberry beyond our per- 
simmons." We began to drop behind. At 
first they waited and coached us; but as we 
were so continually " delayed " they at last 
went ahead in tow of a canal boat, calling 
back that they would wait for us at La Salle. 
We were very long getting to La Salle, and 
they went on; but they left word that they 
would await us at Grafton. 

That was one reason why we were willing 
to run by Grafton in a fog. We escaped 
without being seen by any river man of them 
all, and now with clear consciences were ready 
to attempt the lower river. 

All that is, however, by the way. We were 
on the Mississippi at last, and had arrived at 
Alton, just above the junction of the Mis- 
souri. We had kin-folks there to visit, and we 
had a hard bit of travel ahead of us. So 
we laid off, and began a series of trips to St. 

95 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

Louis by boat, going down in the morning on 
the big sidewheeler Spread Eagle and com- 
ing back on her at night, to study the course of 
the channel and the eccentricities of the river. 

There is a saying that one meets everyone 
he knows on Broadway. It is equally true of 
the Mississippi. One meets there everyone 
he knows who has ever been on the river. 
Just as sticks drift together in an eddy, so 
travelers by this waterway are thrown to- 
gether. An instance came at Alton. There 
had been a time in Chicago some months ear- 
lier when a sternwheel steamboat had come 
in from the lake to the river, running with- 
out a license. The boat was seized and fined 
about five hundred dollars, — more than it 
was worth. As marine reporter I had a lot 
of fun out of the adventure. We were 
amazed to find them at Alton. They had evi- 
dently passed us on the way. Ignorant of my 
relation to their troubles, they showed me the 
story I had written, and said if they ever 
found out who wrote it they would skin him 
alive. Which I urged them to do — when 
they found him. 

96 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

When we left Alton the owner of this little 
steamboat — the Litlit G. — offered to tow us 
to St. Louis; but Janet softly whispered 
" Hoo-doo," and I gently declined. They left 
Alton on Saturday morning. We followed in 
the afternoon, and as we swung into the 
crossing and passed over to the Missouri shore 

— following the channel we had studied with 
such care from the deck of the Spread Eagle 

— we had a last sight of Lulu piled up broad- 
side on the top of a dike stretching out from 
the Illinois side of the river. 

But we crowed a little too soon. We were 
coming down to the union of the Missouri 
and Mississippi, and anyone who trifles with 
the Father of Waters on his wedding day is 
taking chances. 

The Missouri pours into the Mississippi a 
great, turbulent, yellow flood, a few miles below 
and opposite to Alton. The Mississippi is 
there pushed into a long bend on the Illinois 
side, and the green-brown water of the upper 
river is forced into a narrow part close 
to shore, while the smaller but swifter Mis- 
souri spreads out tawny yellow over a mile 

97 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

or so between the line of demarcation and the 
Missouri side. This Hne of demarcation be- 
tween the impinging waters is a curiously 
sharply defined one, a line of yellow bubbles 
floating down on both sides of it, whirling 
eddies marking the inequality of the bottom, 
but the waters apparently flowing many miles 
without mixing. At the foot of the long bend 
the current crosses to the Missouri side, then 
back toward Illinois, around the dangerous 
Chain of Rocks (where St. Louis draws its 
water supply), and, returning to Missouri, 
keeps near that side to St. Louis. 

Upstream boats on the Mississippi custom- 
arily keep well out from shore in bends, so 
as to escape the swiftest current. In this 
Missouri bend they do not do this, because the 
Missouri part of the river is the swifter and 
more dangerous. They crowd right in on 
shore. We entered this bend at evening, in- 
tending to run through it and tie up in the 
slackwater at its foot, where the current made 
ofl; to the Missouri shore. As we came into 
it a line of four steamboats, the Saturday 
night fleet out of St. Louis, started into the 

98 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

foot of it. Had I known what I knew a little 
later, I would have pulled out into the stream 
and given them a wide berth. Instead, I 
clung to the bank. It was a steep cutting 
bank, which the engineers were preparing to 
revet. It was cut in scallops, perhaps fifty 
feet across, and each contained an eddy. We 
kept to the swiftest water, which just skirted 
the tips of the points. The bank was per- 
fectly upright, and about thirty feet above our 
roof. The water under us may have beeji 
thirty or forty feet deep — probably was all 
of that. 

We were half through the bend before I 
realized our predicament, and then it was too 
late to menH it. The steamers were at hand, 
each one with searchlight turned on us. They 
came on in echelon, the first none too far from 
shore, the last much nearer. Before we could 
do more than make the lamp secure they were 
on us. The first went by perhaps fifty feet 
away, the second forty. By this time we were 
in a mad cross sea, tossing, whirling, turning 
round and round, but taking scarcely a drop 
over the deck. My wife sat on the edge of 

99 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

the bunk firmly clasping the lamp, I stood 
on deck gripping the roof and holding the 
signal lantern. The eddies and the waves 
roared, the steamboats whistled, the search- 
lights dazzled, and everything seemed to be 
turned to chaos. As the third boat went by, 
thirty feet away, there was a shrill whistle 
and a yell, and a gasoline launch darted out 
of the eddy ahead, turned quickly, just graz- 
ing our side, and disappeared into the turmoil 
upstream. Then the fourth boat was on us 
so close I could almost have touched it with 
a sweep. There was a crash of waves, 
a roar of caving bank; a mighty swell from 
the shore where the earth had fallen in 
swept our deck; and then the Easy Way, still 
afloat and unharmed, but with her crew 
thoroughly demoralized, glided into quieter 
water. 

There were three more steamboats coming 
over the crossing by the Chain of Rocks. 
Unable to judge how far ahead was our an- 
chorage (we could have made it easily), I 
took no chances but began working out into 
the stream. We lost the current and were 

lOO 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

soon over a mud bar, with three or four feet 
of water under us. The moon was shining 
and we could see snags sticking up all around 
us. We slowly worked our way through them 
until two fishermen, coming upstream in a 
skiff, hailed us and warned us that if we 
went further by night we would run on Chain 
of Rocks. So I put a bow line on an ancient 
Missouri river snag, dropped down a hundred 
feet to another and put a stern line on that, 
hauled in the bow line till we lay half way 
between them, and made fast. There we lay, 
in three feet of water, snug as a bug in a 
rug. But it was a pretty weird experience 
for two young honeymooners. The river was 
falling a foot a day, and we might be ma- 
rooned before we could get away. The snags 
might pull loose, or a dozen other things 
might happen to us. I was on deck with a 
sounding pole every hour during the night — 
and nearly every half hour; but daylight found 
us still afloat, and with the very first crack 
of dawn we were off, safely into the current, 
past the Chain of Rocks, and on, on, straight 
down to the Merchant's Bridge, and beyond 

lOI 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

into the heart of St. Louis, where we tied up 
for the middle of the day. 

This was a critical moment of our journey. 
Janet's family had urged us to try nothing 
more dangerous than the Illinois, and had even 
predicted in the wedding announcement that 
we would return from St. Louis. My own 
people wrote to the same purpose. Our ten 
weeks' leave of absence was almost expired, 
money came in but slowly, and winter was 
fast upon us. We went to the bank in 
" Oklahoma," the shanty-boat landing, walked 
ashore, and tried, away from the river, to 
convince ourselves that this was the end. 

Our experiences since leaving Grafton 
showed that we were entering a stage of 
travail and striving, and of considerable 
danger; and I find these two words set down 
on the pages of the Log, in Janet's hand, as 
characterizing what we actually found. But 
the lure was on us. Our landing among the 
river gypsies was significant. We were of 
them. The settlement was breaking up and 
its members starting down ahead of the colder 
weather. 

102 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

Yet we suffered some indecision even that 
Sunday when we strolled along sight-seeing 
in St. Louis. It must have been a jar of new 
apple butter which decided us. We saw a sign 
in the window of a shabby little grocery which 
happened to be open to trade, and acquired 
a brilliant yellow bowl as well as the sweet 
sauce we carried home in it. As we walked 
briskly back to the waterfront, carrying our 
treasure, the whole spirit of the adventure 
caught us again, in the thought of the sim- 
plicity and freedom of the home in which we 
should eat it. Without a word to each other, 
but with significant glances, we drew in our 
lines and went adrift again. When the boat 
was well out from shore we spread our apple 
butter on Janet's new — and very successful 
— bread; and then, our truant eyes meeting, 
laughed and shook hands on it like the run-a- 
ways we were. We knew then that we would 
go through with it, and we slipped down past 
St. Louis in the comparative quiet of Sunday 
afternoon, delighted to see this troublesome 
landmark sHp astern. 

Here was vv^here our chart began. We had 
103 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

Colonel John A. Ockerson's reproduction on a 
reduced scale of the Mississippi River Com- 
mission's charts from the Merchant's Bridge 
to the Gulf of Mexico. The channel — as it 
had existed a few years before — was marked 
on it with a dotted line, with all the islands, 
chutes, bayous, sloughs, plantations, landings, 
towns, and so forth, and we felt that we could 
now find our way. But the important thing 
was that, chart or no chart, we had gained 
in a few days more than an inkling of the 
way the river shaped itself, the way the cur- 
rent ran. We knew now where to look for 
mooring places, how to run the various 
reaches, and how to handle our boat. We 
had been tried in as hard a situation as we 
were apt to meet and had come through with- 
out harm. Our struggle, we felt, was half 
won. A great flock of geese went honking 
over the Eads Bridge as we went under it — 
geese moving south. It was the fourth of 
November. We felt that we had come in 
happy time for the southern migration. We, 
too, were geese. Perhaps it was instinct that 
was luring us south. Whatever it was, we 

104 



THE MISSISSIPPI 

had been told often enough it was neither 
sense nor reason; we ran by St. Louis with 
a feeUng of mad abandon, drifted down to 
Cahokia ferry and tied up for the night, so 
as to get away next day without having to 
run the gauntlet of the harbor on a business 
day; we ran down to Cahokia ferry with a 
feeling of unmixed devilment. We were real 
old river folks at last, tried and proven, very 
derelicts, so that the crowd that watched and 
ever watches the river from the beautiful 
bridge could not distinguish us from our 
friends the Frenches, or from Espanto the 
" Mexican medicine man," or Blake of the 
Chickasaw Ointment, or Billy Kuykendahl, 
the trader, or Billy Householder, the junk- 
removing expert, all of whose boats were 
drifting', as we were, out of the winter into 
the warmer south. Blackbirds, gypsies, geese 
and we — we were all of a kind. 



105 



CHAPTER VII 

A PEOPLED RIVER 

The Mississippi is to us, as I have said, a 
river not of sandbars or of scenery, but of 
people. We were swept by the rocky columns 
of the Piasa, not unimpressed with the mag- 
nificence of those famous cliffs; the horrid 
bleakness of the off-channel shore was a thing 
of hourly comment with us. But it is the 
multitude which peoples the Great Water that 
remains with us vividly to this day, — a mul- 
titude which changes with every hour, and yet 
which is never changed; and this because it 
is the river itself which lures, which holds, 
which sways, and which gives character, so 
that those who float upon it, who fish its 
depths or who dwell upon its banks but re- 
flect in a myriad facets the self-same charac- 
teristics. Meet them where you may, these 
river folk, as diverse as the moods of the 
Mississippi, are yet ever the same. We had 

io6 



A PEOPLED RIVER 

had upon the IIHnois Httle gHmpses of them 
that had seemed Hke broad acquaintance. Our 
first days upon the Great Water had brought 
us in touch with others of them. But it was 
not until that fair, still day in November, our 
first below St. Louis, when, rising before dawn 
and beginning our journey while the white 
mists still obscured all but the bright eye on 
Arsenal island, we floated easily and thor- 
oughly " at home " down the placid channel 
of the broad river, that we felt stir within us 
and coming to consciousness the real fellowship 
we had with them. 

Perhaps it came to us — it seems now to 
me as I try to single out the details of the 
recollection of that wonderful day, that it must 
have come to us — in the early forenoon ; per- 
haps with our first acquaintance with the 
" Man in the Flat-iron Skifif." I look for him 
yet when I am on the Mississippi, though I 
know that his tiny craft was kindling wood 
years ago and that he may be serving under 
some insurrecto flag, or buried in a soldier's 
grave ten thousand miles away. For the 
" Man in the Flat-iron Skifif " was a soldier 

107 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

of fortune, drifting in leisurely manner down 
the river to find what new adventure might 
await him at its mouth. 

We came upon him, or first noticed him, 
about nine o'clock as we were passing Jeffer- 
son Barracks. He had come from a sandbar 
as we were nearing it, and, in a little wedge- 
shaped skiff not more than ten feet long, was 
curled up as comfortably and as lazily as a 
son of rest could wish to be. In the same 
current, in the same day, two boats will often 
drift with very different speeds. So we over- 
hauled him slowly, came abreast, and finally 
passed him, and for an hour or more we ex- 
changed greetings across the water. He was 
fishing, Ave found when we came near. About 
him, stretched for an eighth of a mile across 
the channel, was a line of jugs floating in the 
water. To the handle of each jug a line was 
attached, and at frequent intervals the over- 
turning of a jug indicated that a fish had 
taken bait. When this happened the Man in 
the Skiff put out an oar in one of two horse- 
shoes which were nailed, open end up, at the 
back corners of the skiff, sculled to the tipped- 

io8 



A PEOPLED RIVER 

up jug, removed the fish and rebaited the 
hue. 

That afternoon, when the wind had risen 
and the fishing was over for the day, he 
hoisted upon a mast at the very tip of the 
wedge an army blanket for a sail, and went 
rapidly past us and away downstream. But 
in the first encounter we had learned his 
story. He was a veteran of many enlistments 
and of many adventures in the Indian wars 
of the west, and his time expiring at a post 
in Montana in June, he had built the vessel 
in which we saw him, and had come in it 
nearly three thousand miles down the swift 
Missouri. On the way he had fished as we 
saw him now, had shot ducks and geese with 
a gun which he showed us, and had worked 
many days in harvest fields along the stream. 
He was going to Jackson Barracks at New 
Orleans to re-enlist, to try what different ex- 
periences might there befall him. He slept 
at night upon whatever sandbar was nearest 
when night fell, rolled up in the blanket which 
made his sail. Sometimes his upturned skiff 
kept off the rain. Sometimes he lay in it, 

109 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

certain to wake in safety if a rising flood 
should carry it away. He acknowledged no 
duty to do more than this we saw him do, — 
to fish, to shoot, to drift, to eat and sleep. He 
lived — he earned his living with the rod and 
line. Beyond that Society had no care about 
him, and he was satisfied. He looked upon 
us as moved by the same things as himself, 
and marveled that we should prefer the Easy 
Way when a canvas cover over a roomy skiff 
would give a house more easily movable and 
as safe. 

Just at noon, as we came down the rocky 
Missouri shore, drifting swiftly by gorgeous 
crags flaming with autumnal colors, we read 
on our chart the opening of the mouth of a 
little creek at the village of Kimswick. We 
chose it for our market-place. Coming close 
to it I brought the Easy Way to shore, caught 
up a line, sprang to the bank, and drew the 
little house boat around a corner into as lovely 
a creek as one could wish. Two grassy banks 
sloped gently down from the cleft rocks of 
the ancient river-wall, bordering the stream. 
Fruit trees hung above it on the slopes, and 

no 



A PEOPLED RIVER 

back, and around a turn, flanked on all sides 
by the brilliant colors of the November leaves, 
were glimpses of white houses, — houses firmly 
fixed, houses on stone foundations, houses of 
stability and permanency, houses that could 
not be led by the nose as ours was, could not 
turn at will into whatever creek most pleased 
them, but must ever stand there in Kimswick, 
on the bankside, and be lived in by stay-at- 
homes. Surely, then, we knew we were of 
the river, not on it; for Janet and I both 
laughed aloud, happily, at the delicious ab- 
surdity of thus taking our house a-calling with 
us, and leaving it, while we went marketing, 
hitched like a horse, with its nose to a grassy 
bank, in this Kimswick creek. 

So we bought steak and were still river folk 
— though when the butcher asked us if we 
would have a " ten cent pound " or a " fifteen 
cent pound," we were so ignorant as to have 
to ask the difference. It seemed that steak 
was " a bit a pound, two pounds for a quarter, 
single pounds fifteen cents," so we chose a 
fifteen-cent pound. When it proved to be two 
pounds and a half, he asked twenty cents for 

III 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

it, which we paid, and were as satisfied as 
the butcher seemed to be. 

We traveled nearly forty miles that day. 
This was real traveling, such as we had 
dreamed of but had not really thought was 
possible. But the next day we made only 
eleven, and, after fighting through a snaggy 
bend above Fort Chartres landing in the after- 
noon, lay moored below a dike through a 
stormy, weird night, while the wind howled 
above us, the Easy Way lifted and fell un- 
easily, straining at her tether, the rain fell in 
torrents, and a dozen times between dark and 
dawn I went the round of the deck to make 
sure the lines were holding and we were not 
to be blown out into the stream. 

The wind howls and the rain drives on the 
land. Where I write it sweeps to-day across 
the forty miles of hills between me and gray 
Monadnock yonder and smites my windows 
with enormous force. But there is lacking 
something in it, some quality of danger, of 
elemental power, of chance, perhaps, that we 
found in it then when in our cozy cabin we 
read aloud from Mark Twain's tale of life 

112 



A PEOPLED RIVER 

on this self-same stream, and between chap- 
ters Hstened to the rush of it in the trees on 
the bank overhead, to the whistHng or cough- 
ing of some passing steamer, or to the roar- 
ing swish of the rain on roof and windows. 
Some day, I think, when I am old, and my 
blood runs sluggishly, and I spend days curled 
up before an open fire, I will dream back to 
that wild night below the Fort Chartres dike, 
— not to the age-long struggle with the scull- 
ing oar, keeping the Easy Way from the wait- 
ing snags, not to the Kimswick creek and the 
Soldier of Fortune, but to that eerie, weird 
wildness which, felt without reason, stamps for 
its own such nights as that and marks them 
for a lifetime. 

We went down the Okaw chute next day, 
the river flowing still and glassy, hiding its 
own swift ruthlessness, over the very place 
where once stood gay Kaskaskia, first capital 
of Illinois. Here Rodgers Clarke had come 
upon the dancing habitants and the watchless 
British; here Lincoln had argued roundly to 
a country jury; and from the broad veranda 
of yonder white house on the hillside old 

"3 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

Pierre Menard looked out over the stream to 
the broad acres beyond, to the fertile bottom- 
lands where his ancestors had settled and 
was content, while the rush and drive of the 
coming civilization swept on to St. Louis and 
to Chicago. 

We found that we were not the only bridal 
couple on the stream; for as we drifted there 
came out from the Okaw into the larger 
stream a long and narrow skiff, over the stern 
of which on a pair of wagon hoops was 
mounted a canvas top like that of a gypsy's 
traveling van. In the front of this snug cabin 
sat a sweet- faced young woman — a country 
girl, fresh and rosy, with sparkling eyes and 
merry countenance; while at the oars sat a 
young man idly, the blades resting on the 
water, the handles crossed before him, while 
his gaze turned up the hillside where the girl 
pointed to the silhouetted rampart of old Fort 
Gage, half seen among the walnut trees. The 
chance of the current brought us soon together, 
and we found that they, like ourselves, had set 
out on their wedding day, to learn something 
of the lands downstream. Their journey was 

114 



A PEOPLED RIVER 

to be less ambitious than ours. They had come 
fram " up the Okaw " and they were bound 
for Cairo, where, if the stream were not too 
swift, they would turn up the Ohio and thence 
up the Wabash and the White to a point not 
far from their home; but if it were too swift 
for comfort they would go overland from 
Cairo. They had a tiny camp stove which they 
set up on the bank at meal times, and by draw- 
ing the skiff up on a sandbar they found com- 
fortable sleeping quarters under the canvas 
cover, which could be extended a few feet for- 
ward. For bad weather they had thought they 
could stop at a village hotel. 

That idea of stopping nightly at a village 
hotel amused us greatly — as old river folks ; 
yet we had had ourselves the notion of the pos- 
sibility, without any intention to take advantage 
of it. Book geography and fact geography are 
far apart. In the book maps the rivers are 
dotted with the names of places where one may 
expect hospitality; and, having studied these, 
a conservative and very scandalized relative of 
ours said, when she inspected the Easy Way: 

" Of course you will go to a hotel every 
115 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

night," — with the idea that nothing else 
would be quite respectable. Later when we 
learned that a week o£ stormbound idleness 
between even the smallest landings might be 
expecteH as a regular feature, we frequently 
repeated this suggestion to each other at 
nightfall as a reminder of our own (and 
other folks') impracticability. 

We stopped at Chester that afternoon, a 
quaint city at the top and bottom of a hill. 
There is considerable rivalry there between 
the upper and the lower towns over the loca- 
tion of the postoffice. When it is below those 
uphill slide down to it; when it is above those 
below must climb a flight of steep stone steps 
set in the hillside — three hundred or more 
of them. When we called the office was at 
the top. A darky boy told us it was " jes' up 
dem steps," and as there were but a dozen in 
sight we started the ascent. Eventually we 
arrived at the summit of the bluff, and, when 
we had rested, were well rewarded by a won- 
derful panorama of the valley. But mail we 
found none, for, as the postmaster cheerfully 
informed us, the Chicago pouch had been 

ii6 



A PEOPLED RIVER 

stolen the night before on its way up from the 
train. 

The day we were at Chester was election 
day, and President McKinley was contesting 
for re-election. It was too early to hear of 
the result, and we returned to our boat to 
find half our dishes piled in fragments upon 
the floor of the cabin, as the result of an ad- 
venture with a passing steamboat in our ab- 
sence. We gathered them up and threw them 
overboard — the shanty-boater's easy method 
of disposing of things he does not need — and 
drifted down past Crane's island to the high 
bank of Cape Rest. 

Water froze in our settling pail that night 
nearly an inch thick; and for a blustering, 
frigid, wintry day we lay at the mooring. 
Heavily bundled in winter clothes, Janet and 
I walked briskly over the rough bottomland 
roads, past countless " white " hogs vainly 
rooting at the frozen ground, past hermeti- 
cally sealed farmhouses, and at last back 
again to our warm and cozy cabin. We were 
a little worried that day at the coming of 
winter, and eager for a chance to run far- 

117 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

ther south before the ice began to float down 
the river. 

In the evening we went up to the Httle store 
and postoffice at the landing. A dozen chaw- 
terbacker farmers sat around, spitting at the 
stove. A big, fur-coated stage driver came in 
and threw a bundle of mail on the counter. 

"Who'd they 'lect, Dave?" demanded the 
assembled farmers. 

" Old Bill himself," replied the driver. 

" Which Bill? " queried a little weazened-up 
old man in the corner. " I got two bits bet on 
Bill Bryan I 'd hate to lose." 

" Well, you lost it," said the stage driver. 
" It 's Bill McKinley." 

The weazened-up farmer chuckled. *' I ain't 
hit so bad," he said. " I hedged by betting two 
bits on McKinley, too." 

We were gone before daylight on a still, 
wintry morning, skimming along a shore which 
was bordered with ice. I stood out on the after 
deck at the sculling oar, keeping the boat out 
of the bends where snags lay. The smoke pipe 
of our kitchen stove came through the after 
wall and ended conveniently near. When my 

ii8 



A PEOPLED RIVER 

hands stiffened on the oar I had but to hold 
them over the vent to warm them promptly. 
We were in a wonderful region of the river 
now. The morning brought us to Grand Eddy 
and Seventy-six landing. We came out of a 
big bend where the government engineers were 
constructing riprap work, sweeping swiftly with 
the current, then by a quick use of the oars 
turned down under a projecting point, swept 
across a small space of revolving eddy, missed 
by a narrow margin the larger whirl which gives 
the place its name, and then, passing Red Rock, 
had the beautiful front of the Fountain Bluff 
standing like an opposing wall before us. 

There are two of these straight-standing 
walls past which the Mississippi makes its way 
in close succession here. The Fountain Bluff, 
the first of them, stands opposite the noble 
front of Cape Cinque Hommes, an isolated 
peak in the bottomlands, long enough to hide 
from the traveler downstream the possibility 
of outlet. It was flaming with color when we 
rushed by its foot, and for many miles stood 
sentinel over our way. We turned the sharp 
angle in front of it, went down by the landing 

119 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

of Wittenburg and its old mill, found the thin 

thread of current which leads to safety by the 

Devil's Bake Oven and the Devil's Back Bone 

on one hand and the one-time dangerous Tower 

Rock on the other, and turned straight down 

the Missouri shore in front of Grand Tower. 

We lay in Bainbridge's creek that night, 

our little vessel sheltered from every sea, 

moored with lines to both banks so that it 

touched neither, and as comfortable as a 

cradle. We found an old couple in a house 

above who sold us the best of everything at 

the lowest price, and who told us that all their 

lives they had hungered to lock their doors and 

start, as we had started, down the river with 

the river multitude and learn and experience 

all that was below. The time had never come 

yet — " but some day " they said, and happily 

believed it would. And in the creek itself lay 

a flatboat, no more than an uncovered box, ten 

feet wide, thirty or so in length, and perhaps 

three deep, in the midst of which was pitched 

an ancient tent in which were living a man, a 

woman and three little children. They had 

built it somewhere in Illinois — at East St. 

1 20 




His Iravcllinfi; house — very typical 



A PEOPLED RIVER 

Louis if memory serves; and they too had 
caught the fever and started seaward. They 
had had money only for the hull, some traps, 
a gun and some fike-nets. The tent they had 
possessed. With this simple outfit they had 
started ; fishing, trapping and shooting as they 
went, and selling the fruits in every market. 
Already they had earned a tidy nest-egg, and 
at Cairo were to tie up to build a deck over the 
hull and thus raise the tent above waterline; 
and perhaps, if they were prosperous enough, 
to begin a cabin. 

The woman appeared tired. Housekeeping 
in such a tent with three children is no easy 
matter. But when her husband had gone out 
silently in his skiif to set his lines, and the glow 
of his pipe came back irregularly through the 
darkness, she sat on the edge of the hull over 
against our deck and told us about it — the 
relief from the monotony of a kitchen in a 
fixed spot in a city, the freedom, the wildness 
which somehow she had always craved. 

" Don't you find it pretty hard, sometimes ? " 
we asked. 

She nodded silently, but looking out over 

121 



THE LOG OF THE K\SY WAY 

the river into the darkness where her husband 
was, and listening to the soft murmuring of 
the shore eddies at the mouth of the creek, 
she forgot all the troubles, all the storms, the 
cold, the weariness, the danger of swamping, 
the risk of illness; her face took on a new 
expression, almost of inspiration, in the soft 
glow from our cabin light, and she breathed 
deeply the pure, fine air of the river. 

" Oh, but it 's elegant, though ! " she said, 
and though words failed her to say more we 
knew that she, too, was one of those to whom 
the vision is given, and that all that the poet 
feels was in her heart. 

They are there to-day, I know. Some other 
woman in the Bainbridge creek, some other 
couple in their canvas-roofed skiff, some other 
wandering Soldier of Fortune with his gun 
and jug-lines. The river is there; and on its 
bank the same multitude listening to its siren 
whispers, listening to the mysterious, the never- 
understood yet ever-appealing murmuring of 
its eddies, longing endlessly to go, as these 
were going, with the Father of Waters, wher- 
ever his spirit might choose to lead them. 

122 



CHAPTER VIII 

WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

Cold weather was rapidly coming on. Some 
day soon the dwellers in these houses beside 
the river would look out on a stream covered 
with running ice. Later these cakes would 
be forced and jammed together, and in a night 
the whole would freeze over. No travel then 
for shanty-boaters; every tiny craft would 
be hauled out on the bank, moored under the 
shelter of a dike or safely harbored in some 
such place as this Bainbridge creek. We on 
the Easy Way watched with much worry this 
rapid advance of winter. Ice in our settling 
pail was a bad sign. It meant that we must 
push ahead, must take all chances, must 
travel our fastest, lest we, too, be frozen in 
and made to spend a winter by the way or 
abandon our trip altogether. 

So in the early morning of a cold Novem- 
ber day, with frost on deck and ice in the pail, 

123 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

we started from our safe harbor and caught 
the current southward. The river was still 
flowing strongly, but before we had been out 
half an hour the wind had come fresh out of 
the northeast; sullen, leaden clouds were pil- 
ing up, and the first flakes of snow were sift- 
ing lightly through the air. The wind grew 
so strong that we were driven broadside on 
Devil Island bar, luckily on the steep, chan- 
nel side, where there was ample water under 
us. For an hour I rested from my struggle 
at the sweep, and then for another hour 
chopped into firewood fine oak and walnut 
timber which had accumulated on the bar. 
Then, in a lull of the wind, we set out again 
and with much difficulty made shelter in a 
creek above the noble promontory of Cape 
Rock. 

In all our river trip we had no more delight- 
ful camping place than that. The river had 
filled the creek to a depth of perhaps four 
feet, for a hundred yards in from the bank. 
The bottomland on both sides was covered 
with an open hardwood forest, richly yellow 
with autumnal covering. The creek was just 

124 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

wide enough for us to enter, and when we 
had gone a little way upstream we found a 
turn and a widening. A tree had fallen 
across, making a bridge. We put out three 
lines, swinging our boat gently but securely, 
and there was no open way for waves from 
steamboats to come in from the river. The 
wind died down and the sun came out. The 
air warmed delightfully and the golden gleam 
of the leaves gave it even a warmer appear- 
ance. We walked some miles to Cape Gir- 
ardeau — an ancient French capital of this 
vicinity, a town of several colleges and of 
fine, substantial, old stone houses — and 
brought home mail and supplies, and spent 
a peaceful night in the assurance that noth- 
ing could disturb us. And at the very break 
of day we were off again. The clouds had 
come, and the morning was threatening, but 
we were eager to get south, so we kept to 
the channel. Out around the beautiful cape 
we went, having up and down stream a gor- 
geous view of nut-brown and golden-brown 
hills, fading into stormy gray. The current 
carried us out around an eddy, then down 

125 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

close by the levee of the town, along by the 
foot of a railway embankment where, on 
stilts above the water, were a score of shanty- 
boats serving as land-houses, tax free. We 
entered a great bend and at ten o'clock came 
in sight of the second of the mighty bluffs of 
the river, the great cliff above Thebes, over 
against the rocky nose of Gray's Point. 

There is a bridge at Thebes now. In 
those days there were many railway trans- 
fer boats ferrying freight trains across. It 
is the last rocky reach on the river. There 
the Mississippi, after twisting and turning in 
an endeavor to keep to its old hills, finds itself 
foiled in its moves, and sweeps at last through 
a boulder-strew^n channel, dragging steam- 
boats and drifters over jagged rocks and 
through devious ways where it may wreck 
them unawares, spiting itself for its en- 
forced abandonment of its noble cliffs. 

These reefs make even to-day a horrible 
barrier, though the government has removed 
the worst of them. On our chart we saw 
then listed " rocks," more " rocks," then 
''Grand Chain of Rocks," "Little Chain of 

126 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

Rocks," " Boulder," " Counterfeit Rock," and 
last of all, far below the rest, ^' Beaver Dam 
Rock," in the very middle of the channel. We 
came around the bend at Gray's Point to the 
first rocky part, and with the chart before us 
picked our way into the fleet of transfers 
playing below us. We were working toward 
the Missouri shore, whence the wind came, 
to pass close to leeward of the Grand Chain. 
There were steamboats all about us. Sud- 
denly, taking us entirely unawares, came a 
snow squall, and in an instant the snow was 
flying thick as a fog about us, the wind, which 
had shifted instantly, was driving us toward 
the Grand Chain at a high speed, and the 
Easy Way, surrounded by unseen steamboats, 
was in the greatest peril it had yet experi- 
enced. I was on deck, barefoot. There was 
no time to put on shoes and stockings. I ran 
to lower the current boards, to check our drift- 
ing with the wind, and then with the sculling 
oar turned the boat head to the wind and 
sculled my hardest. The steamboats were all 
whistling and feeling their way. We caught 
a glimpse of one close at hand, then of an- 

127 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

other. The snow piled up on the after deck 
and covered my feet, but I was working so 
fast I did not notice it. Straining and tug- 
ging, we were still borne toward the wreck- 
age, until we heard the roar of water over 
rocks, and were swept by the Grand Chain 
within a biscuit toss of it. Then the snow 
stopped as quickly as it had come, and the 
wind went down. The sun shone, and the 
Easy Way went without difficulty past the 
head of Power's island, kept on along a cut- 
ting bank in spite of another sudden squall, 
and came to rest at dusk in the shelter of a 
towhead at New Philadelphia. 

That was a Sunday evening. The night 
was cold and clear. We were moored to a 
sharp bank, behind a cutting towhead, with 
flat lands extending for miles on both sides 
of the river, and with low hills barely dis- 
cernible by daylight to the north. Those 
hills, that narrow passage, were the gates of 
summer. Winter raged in vain. He had 
made his last bid for us and had lost us. We 
had escaped his grasp. On Monday we 
drifted with but an average amount of work 

128 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

around a bend below the town, back to the 
north and around Greenleaf Bend, and to an 
anchorage behind a bar below there; and on 
Tuesday we moored the Easy Way close to 
an engineer's camp some miles below, and 
walked through the woods and over the levee 
to Cairo. As we came into town along the 
narrow, raised sidewalk, roses peeped out at 
us between fence palings. Violets bloomed 
in many yards and scented the air sweetly. 
Climbing vines flowered the houses. It was 
stepping suddenly, without expectation, into 
spring again. A warm, balmy southwind 
blew gently upon us. We walked slowly, 
breathing this new life in deep contentment. 
It meant much to us. We had escaped from 
winter, and had arrived south. We were at 
Mason and Dixon's line. These Negroes, sun- 
ning themselves along the levee, were south- 
ern Negroes, — plantation darkies. These 
trains of cars, standing above the landing, were 
trains for the Southland; local trains, to be 
ferried across the water and run into Ken- 
tucky and Missouri. There were Jim Crow 
cars on the trains. Curious opposition of signs 

129 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

by which we knew the South — by its roses 
and violets and by its darkies. Yet they were 
all there, and we had arrived. 

We went back to the Easy Way and found 
a tramp standing beside it. As he told his 
tale it suddenly struck us as funny, the pre- 
dicament he was in. He had walked south in 
Illinois. He had come to the end. Now there 
was nowhere else to walk. A river shut him 
off on both sides. He could not swim across. 
He had no money to pay his way on a boat. 
He was, undeniably, in a remarkable predica- 
ment. The river was an impassible ocean to 
him. So I took mercy on him and bade him 
be on hand in the morning. It was a chHly 
night, and in the morning, at five o'clock, he 
had a fire on the bank and was gradually 
thawing himself out. Never in my life have 
I seen a man look colder than this poor- 
spirited, thinly clad tramp after a night in the 
river-fog on the Cairo shore. As for Janet, 
she was going through a revolution in spirit. 
She had accepted Annie — in Annie's boat. 
She had found the Sturgeon King a source of 
amusement and information. The woman in 

130 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

Bainbridge's creek had aroused a deep sympa- 
thy in her. But she still retained urban or sub- 
urban standards. Her pride was stirred to 
the depths and her faith in her husband almost 
wrecked at the spectacle of this useless, in- 
efficient and extremely dirty tramp being in- 
vited to come aboard her boat, and, worst of all, 
to eat with the family. 

" What would mama say? " must have been 
the most persistent question in her mind; and 
she determined — so she confesses now — 
that the family should never hear of it. 
I was none too certain on the subject my- 
self, for he was a villainous-looking fellow. 
Yet some instinct, perhaps for adventure, 
prompted me to invite him to eat with us, 
although a handout seemed more appropriate. 
He had scarcely stepped aboard than his at 
once apparent cowardice and fright began to 
interest us, and even Janet was soon laughing 
in her sleeve at him. 

He was afraid to walk along our deck. On 
the narrow guard over which Janet danced 
a dozen times a day without thought of acci- 
dent, he clung tremblingly to the roof and 

131 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

begged me to go to the other side and balance 
the boat. Soap and water, to which he was 
invited before breakfast, found him still 
more timid; but compulsion was on him. He 
washed. And then, initiated to hot cornmeal 
mush, home-made bread and coffee, he ate 
timidly, as far from us as he could get at the 
table. 

By the time we had finished breakfast we 
were in the bend at Bird point, on the Missouri 
shore. I swung the boat to land; eagerly but 
cautiously he clambered off, doffed his hat and 
stammered out his gratitude. Janet, if my 
memory serves, vented her feeling by scrub- 
bing the table where he had eaten. For my- 
self I was extremely glad to see the last of 
him; not alone because of my lady's partially- 
suppressed horror. A few minutes later we 
swung in toward the Kentucky shore, its low 
banks yellow with sycamore leaves. Janet 
suddenly burst into merry laughter at the 
thought of this coming to her ancestral state, 
into which her forbears had trudged with 
Boone to rise to high offices and to command 
its troops in two wars — and into which she 

132 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

came now in a shanty-boat, with a tramp as 
a breakfast guest, and her husband working 
barefoot and bareheaded on deck, to the Ken- 
tucky eye as much a river rat as the worst 
of them. Under the magic influence of Ken- 
tucky the tramp sank back into obHvion; we 
landed for the mere pleasure of it several 
times, and roamed about under the yellow 
sycamores and along country roads to drink 
it in. Migrating tanagers made the day 
memorable. 

It was a delightful day ; and many more fol- 
lowed it, while we drifted past Columbus and 
Hickman, past an eddy at the Chalk Cliffs 
against which we had been warned; past 
sycamore woods and the mouths of bayous, 
and at last running late one stilly, wonderful 
evening — while ducks and geese quacked 
noisily from the bars, and owls hooted from 
the wildernesses back of them — down the 
long reach past Donaldson's 'Point and the* 
towhead that marks the site of Island Num- 
ber Ten, and under the frowning bluffs from 
which the Fighting Bishop made his brave 
stand against the Union fleet. 

133 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

At every turn adventure awaited us. We 
moored that night at La Farge's landing and 
in the morning, wind driven, blew ashore near 
the mouth of the bayou St. John, in the shelter 
of the chute behind Morrison's island. A sign 
on the bank forbade our tying up, but we had 
no option. As I drove my stakes a young man 
came hastily down the bank and hailed us. He 
proved to be a pleasant chap and I invited him 
in. When we had visited for an hour or so 
he told us that this was his land, that he had 
prepared the signs. " But I don't want you-all 
to pay no attention to them at all," he said, 
heartily. " Fact is, I like you-all. I want you- 
all to come up to the house and visit us for a 
week or so." 

We did not do that, but we had many merry 
days visiting back and forth between the Easy 
Way and the old plantation house back of Mor- 
rison's island, before we were able to start on 
our way downstream. For five days the wind 
blew hard, and most of that time the rain fell. 
There was heavy rain in the Ohio. The river, 
which had been dropping slowly, as slowly 
ceased to drop, turned sluggishly and began 

134 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

to rise — an inch the first day, six inches the 
next, a foot the next and then two feet a day, 
steadily higher. 

We were in a " feud country " now. Three 
states come together at this point. We had 
passed the lower line of Kentucky when we 
passed below Island Number Nine — no longer 
an island but a part of the Kentucky shore. We 
had then Tennessee on our left and Missouri 
on the right. But when we passed around the 
towhead of Number Ten and swept north to La 
Farges's with Missouri still on our right, we 
had passed again north of the Kentucky boun- 
dary. There is, therefore, opposite the town 
of New Madrid, which lies beside the bayou 
St. John, a little thumb-cap of land on the tip 
of a point belonging to the state of Kentucky. 
It is about two miles across and five miles long. 
It has no town, no village, — only cotton fields, 
woods and very few houses. On the back of 
it is Tennessee, across the river on every side 
Missouri. To aid those evil doers to escape 
whom even the three states may want, there 
are the fastnesses of the bayou St. John and 
the bayou James, the intricate woodland chan- 

135 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

nels of the Scatters of Reel foot or, within easy 
reach, the mysteries of Little and Castor rivers, 
and the Dornocks of the St. Francis. 

Little wonder, then, that when a feud broke 
out between the families of Darnell and Wat- 
son on one side, and those of the Lanes and 
the Edwardses on the other, that there followed 
a period of bloody fighting and the assemblage 
of many unlawful characters. Mark Twain, 
blessed be his memory, has embalmed the thing 
in *' Huckleberry Finn " in the feud of the 
Grangerfords and the Shephardsons, and this 
bayou St. John was perhaps the very stream 
in which Huck's raft was hidden while he was 
visiting " Bub " and his folks ; but the story 
there told with all its horror does not even 
shadow the reality. There is no officer of the 
law on Kentucky point. It is forty miles by 
river to the sheriff. It is almost as safe to 
break the law in Tennessee; and New Ma- 
drid, across the river, was for generations 
known as the " toughest " town on the Missis- 
sippi. There had always been counterfeiters, 
thieves, cut-throats hiding in the swamps. 
When the feud broke out their numbers in- 

136 




" Bum Collier's ]Joy " 
He had no otiier name, but he might have been Huck Finn 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

creased, and as the families lost fighting 
strength and gradually deteriorated they 
began enlisting these ruffians until each man 
carried a large body-guard like a general with 
an attending army, wherever he went. 

There were many battles — some of which 
Tom, our new friend, told us of as he sat on 
the deck or in the cabin of the Easy Way. 
Some, doubtless, he produced from fancy. 
Others we have since confirmed. True or not, 
his tales were thrilling masterpieces; and the 
climax to them all came when at the end of 
an account of butchery Tom capped it all by 
declaring that " Fo' my part I don't believe any 
man is got a right to shoot any other man 
when his wife is present." 

My wife being ever present I dareH to guy 
Tom at will — a guying he took merrily 
enough; but his hand was never far from a 
huge, blue-barrelled pistol when he was passing 
through his wooded land. Life was a solemn, 
hard thing for him, while it was merry, too. 
He gave us much good advice about the river 
and promised to come up to Chicago some day 
and show us the town as we did not know it. 

137 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

But he never came. Within a week after we 
had unmoored the Easy Way and drifted out 
of his Hfe poor Tom was dead — found dead 
in his beloved woods. 

We left New Madrid on a rising river. It 
was a clear, still, sunshiny day; but for the 
first few miles we had little time to enjoy it. 
When the Mississippi river begins to rise the 
rats and mice along the bank take to shanty- 
boat life. As we had had a gang plank out, 
to say nothing of neglecting to put tomato cans 
on our mooring lines, we had acquired more 
than our due share of mice. As we drifted by 
New Madrid — through L'Ainse la Graise 
(Grease Bend) of the old days — we had all 
our furniture piled upon the bed except, of 
course, the stove; and we were busy chasing 
mice. Up and down, back and forth we raced. 
Now we cornered half-a-dozen of them, now 
they all got away; but at last, one by one, two 
by two, I caught them in my hands and threw 
them overboard to swim ashore — something 
each and every one of them was still attending 
to when he drifted from our view. The last 
one of them swam back three times, and climbed 

138 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

aboard but our persistent repulses wearied him. 
He mounted a chip that came his way, and, 
sitting bolt upright as long as we ^vere in 
view, shivered and rattled his teeth in a 
prolonged effort to move our sluggish con- 
sciences. 

The river was rising now. To a shanty- 
boater that means a great deal. It means that 
the danger of grounding on bars is gone; for 
each hour there is more water and in a day 
a fair rise will be enough to float a shanty 
where there was dry land yesterday. It means 
that the banks which when the river falls are 
wet and slippery are now dry and firm above 
the rising waterline. It means a sudden in- 
crease in the amount of floating logs, trees, 
boards and small drift. This is both welcome 
and unwelcome, but mostly the former, for 
real shanty-boaters, being in a lumber country, 
— as most of it is down here — will tie up near 
an eddy and catch the logs that drift in, make 
them into a raft and either float them to mill 
or sell them to a towboat. I have known two 
partners to clear one hundred dollars on a rise 
in that way. Every progressive shanty-man 

139 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

carries chain dogs and other appHances for 
the purpose. 

The drift helped us, too, for on many days 
when the wind hindered we caught the whole 
top of a tree or a big stump and were pulled 
steadily along, by our trusty friend Charles 
William Albright. 

There is a wonderful fascination in a rising 
river. One drifts in a stream in which are 
islands, sandbars, horrid sandy points. When 
he sweeps along a cutting shore the top of 
the bank is away up there, forty feet above 
him. Then, silently, mysteriously, the islands 
begin to vanish — first the bars of mud and 
sand and the muddy point; then the sandy 
points. Then there are willow fringes stick- 
ing up out of the water all along the off-channel 
side, where before was a wide muddy waste. 
Then the high bank suddenly stoops; and so 
to us, from the deck of the Easy Way, as we 
neared Memphis, the bank came steadily down, 
until in many places we were no longer in a 
canyon but could look over the green spreading 
sward before the levees. 

And all this time the rain fell, endlessly, 
140 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

It began again the day after we had left New 
Madrid. Having us securely out in the wil- 
derness it washed the hasty paint out of our 
canvas roof-cover and dripped through. First 
it dripped on the table ; then on the trunk. Then 
a wet spot appeared in the " hall way." Then 
over the bed it began to show in the boarding 
and to run along in little streams, and drop 
down. I got out a table oil-cloth and spread it 
above the bed, hanging it from the roof carvels ; 
and at night, waking, we could hear the rain 
drop on this from above, and — after it had run 
down the gutter of the oil-cloth — drip noisily 
into a kettle which I suspended over the foot 
of the bed to catch it. There seemed no re- 
lief from it. It drizzled steadily in, by day 
and by night. And with the rain the banks 
grew as soft as though the river were falling. 
We were between the St. Frances and the Scat- 
ters of Reelfoot now. We came to Reelfoot, 
landing at " Ringtail," as we absent-mindedly 
called it, on an uncanny, strange night, and 
climbed ashore along the perilous gunwale of 
an empty barge waiting for a treasure of hard- 
wood boards to be slid down a chute into its 

141 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

cavernous interior. We crawled up the chute 
on hands and knees, and had a fine time of it, 
and quite lost sight of our real errand, which 
was to find a trader and a box of baking 
powder. 

Other things were coming down on the flood, 
too. We caught a pumpkin, and some fine 
winter squashes, as hard and cold in the river 
water as though out of an ice box. Others 
were in the same pursuit. It is a favorite 
source of supply with shanty-boaters. And 
as the rain still continued there came a day, 
when we had passed through the beautiful 
chute of Island Eighteen, and had weathered a 
gale in its snug harbor, and had felt our way 
through the difficult Cottonwood Point region 
and over the crossing above Island Twenty-one 
in a dense fog — there came a time when 
with rain in the boat, and swampy banks, and 
winter appa,rently coming on us, that we 
were ready to sell our boat and give up our 
trip. 

It was a time of bleakness and discourage- 
ment for us. The leaking roof made the cabin 
uncomfortable; the stormy weather, the wet 

142 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

banks, the monotony of the featureless shores 
wore upon us. But worst of all our newspaper 
work had been slighted under continual prod- 
ding from our public commission. Congress 
would adjourn soon, the memorial must be 
prepared, there was no time to stop for ma- 
terial or to write and mail stories. At New 
Madrid we had written two fiction stories and 
sent them to McClure's, but we had slight hopes 
of getting them accepted. And now as we 
came into the most desolate reach of the entire 
river, with the St. Francis swamp on one side, 
the Reel foot swamp on the other, the blues 
set in strongly and we counted up daily the 
chances of selling the boat and going back 
home. Yet we were ashamed of this idea. 
We hated to think of giving up. 

At Huffman, Arkansas, almost on the Mis- 
souri line, the climax came. There was a river 
man there with several boats and buying more. 
He wanted to buy ours. He came aboard in 
a heavy rain and found everything wet inside, 
and it was too much for him. He offered 
thirty dollars, and we asked one hundred. We 
would have sold for fifty in our state of mind 

143 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

at that time, but he would not raise. So he 
went ashore, and we set out again, the rain 
still raining, around a great desolate sandbar 
in a Tennessee bend. Suddenly the rain 
ceased, the clouds parted, and all afternoon 
the sun shone; and in a complete revulsion 
we cheered up and never went down into the 
depths so deep again during the journey. 

We came into Barfield one night about this 
time. It was a Saturday night. The rain was 
falling in sheets. The bank was still pretty 
high and so steep and soggy that I dared not try 
to climb up it to get to the shore. We dropped 
in below a big Crescent barge which lay at the 
bank getting lumber, and I struggled up the 
slippery board chute to shore. The ground 
was so wet that I frequently went over shoe- 
top deep in it, once or twice almost knee deep. 
Barfield even now is no metropolis. In those 
days it was the jumping-off place — a little 
landing with a few disconsolate houses, each 
marked near the eaves with a streak of mud 
to show how high the last flood rose; a store 
and a saloon. I went to the store. Half a 
dozen men were sitting around, and eyed me 

144 




"A 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

curiously. I bought what we wanted an3 went 
out. 

Curious things happen. Three or four years 
later I stood on the levee at Cape Girardeau, 
Missouri, taking pictures of the river, when a 
stranger accosted me — a well-dressed gen- 
tleman. 

" Pardon me, suh," he said, " but we have 
met befo', though you doubtless do not recall 
it. It was a few years ago, at Bahfield. I 
was a-settin' in the sto' one evenin' when you 
came and bought six eggs, a cake of Sapolio 
and a pound of rice. Wheh you com f'om on 
such a night none present knowed. Wheh 
you went to we did n't know. And, suh, we 
had an evenin' of right sharp discussion oveh 
you, suh, as to what a gentleman comin' f'om 
nowheh, and havin' as fah as we knew no home 
and no abidin' place could be doin' on such a 
night with six eggs, a bah of Sapolio and a 
pound of rice.'' 

But it was always that way on the river. 
Everyone seemed to take notice of us and re- 
member us; and generally we took notice the 
same way. We seemed to strike them as '' dif- 

145 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

ferent." On the day we left Barfield, a nasty, 
cold morning with a little snow, when we had 
run for shelter behind Forked Deer island and 
into the old mouth of Forked Deer river, and 
had wandered over a few miles of muddy farm- 
land, between negro cabins, windowless and 
apparently deserted except for the strains of 
guitar or mandolin coming through the cracks 
— ghost sounds maybe — to a house full of 
measles, with a milky cow — in that day alone 
we made a lifelong impression on half a hun- 
dred people for our amazing stupidity and 
recklessness in wandering bareheaded and ap- 
parently merry, through that dragging, sticky, 
wet clay they called a road, through that pour- 
ing rain, risking a " death-o'-cold " for the 
sake of a pail of milk and a chance to catch 
the measles. The people who lived there 
would n't do it ; we would. There was always 
some difference like that which made each side 
remarkable to the other. 

Plum point was yet ahead of us — Plum 
point which used to be feared by river steam- 
boat men. It is one of the two great shoals 
of the lower river, a region extending between 

146 



WE RUN AWAY FROM WINTER 

fifty and one hundred miles. Swept down by 
the engineers' town of New Haven, and across 
to Plum point itself, we found ourselves sud- 
denly in the dark, missed the channel after 
passing the point, and fetched up on the back 
of Yankee bar. 

Nights on sandbars were familiar enough 
before we got to New Orleans; but that was 
the first. The sand shoaled so gradually we 
could not get within fifty feet of shore, so I 
waded in, drove my stakes, made a line fast 
to them, and so moored the Easy Way (one of 
the places where an anchor would have saved 
trouble). Every hour in the night I took in 
slack as the river rose, and in the morning we 
were right over the stakes, which I recovered 
from the deck. We went on through the chute 
of the bar and passed the splendid Chickasaw 
bluffs. 

The river is narrow and very deep at their 
feet, and eddies tremendously. We went 
through whirling. Next day we went through 
Fogleman chute, and then into Beef Island 
chute where the shore was roaring into the 
water acres at a time, throwing trees and all 

147 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

into the flood. So rounding the bend at Mound 
City, we came at noon in sight of Memphis, 
sitting wonderfully on her hill; and at one 
o'clock moored our house against the willows 
beside the Great Eddy, in the upper end of 
Shanty-boat Town. 



148 



CHAPTER IX 

IN THE GREAT EDDY 

The Great Eddy at Memphis, in which we 
were to spend an adventurous ten days, is 
a highwater phenomenon covering a sandbar 
lying along the shore from the city to Wolf 
river. As the river rises over the bar shanty- 
boats coming in float over it and moor them- 
selves to the higher ground, fringed with wil- 
lows, that becomes the new shore. When that 
in turn is flooded they move down to the city 
levee, or up Wolf river for better shelter. 
As we came in the whole front of the willows 
was lined with the boats. 

As we made our house snug for our first 
trip to the city, half an hour after our arrival, 
an incoming shanty slowly drifted by our stern. 
It was a most dilapidated craft, top-heavy, pa- 
per roofed, patched, unpainted, altogether look- 
ing like the last resort of a homeless wanderer. 

149 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

On its deck two men clung to the roof to avoid 
falling overboard. As they saw us each freed 
one hand and waved us a cheerful greeting 
while their boat rocked perilously. We stared 
at them in amazement, unmixed with pleasure. 
They were our old acquaintances of the canal, 
whom we had dodged in the fog at Grafton — 
the two Frenches themselves, overtaking us at 
last. 

They came ashore abreast of us as we walked 
along, and explained that in trading their skiff 
for a shanty-boat at Grafton they had thought 
they were getting the best of the bargain. In- 
stead they had found themselves in possession 
of a leaky, almost useless boat which they had 
with difficulty kept afloat this far. They were 
only going as far as White river and, they 
assured us, it was nice we had come together 
at last as we could all use our boat the rest 
of the way. 

As we walked the length of Shanty-boat 
Town toward Memphis and the postoffice, we 
closely studied the motley collection of shanty- 
boats assembled. And they studied us, openly 
and stupidly. Among them were many to be 

150 



IN THE GREAT EDDY 

classified on sight: store-boats, traveling pho- 
tographers, medicine-men, and fishers. The 
rest, as we later determined, were mostly junk 
collectors or junk thieves, and a few were, like 
ourselves, traveling for pleasure or to see the 
river. Janet added to her collection another 
educational experience. We had no difficulty 
in discovering as we passed the groups that 
they were passing comments upon our airs and 
our manners in the very moment we were dis- 
secting theirs. It had never occurred to my 
lady that the shanty-boaters might disapprove 
of her as she had of them; and having tried 
their life, endured their hardships, eaten with 
the dirtiest of them and been classified with 
them by the shore-dwellers, it was a hard jolt 
to be criticized as an alien among them. 

That was the day before Thanksgiving. We 
walked up to the postoffice and found a check 
waiting for us, and laid in supplies for the big 
dinner ; not a turkey, for the second-hand stove 
would not cook one, but a juicy porterhouse, 
some real sugary yams and many additional 
fixings, including some real New Orleans mo- 
lasses as sweet and delicate as maple syrup. 

151 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY, 

We strolled about sight-seeing; fed the squir- 
rels in the park, and then went back up the 
sandbar to our house. A seedy-looking swind- 
ler came out that night and showed us a badge 
representing that he was harbor-master, and 
demanded fifty cents for the privilege of moor- 
ing against the willows. He had no legal right 
to the money. We were not in Memphis, and 
certainly not at the levee for the maintenance 
of which a tax is collected. But as the neigh- 
bors all paid it, we beat him down to a quarter 
and settled. A day or two later the river was 
so high that the woods were flooded and most 
of the boats moved down to the levee. Pre- 
ferring quiet, however, we hid the Easy Way 
among the trees to be out of the dangerous 
crush of drifting logs that whirled about in 
the swift eddy, and bought a skiff from a 
neighbor to go to market in. (We had come 
this far, recklessly without a skiff; but the one 
we bought was soon known among our neigh- 
bors as Mathews' Coffin, so we were perhaps 
just as reckless to possess one.) The Frenches, 
unwilling to pay the levee tax, and not discover- 
ing our hiding-place, went on down the river. 

152 



IN THE GREAT EDDY 

We started our Thanksgiving dinner early, 
putting the yams in to roast as soon as we 
were through breakfast. Next to us in the 
eddy was a store-boat manned by a lonesome 
young chap from Missouri, better dressed, 
better educated and of a better type than most 
of our neighbors. This was Clarence Jones — 
it was impossible to call him anything but 
Clarence. His greeting was so friendly and 
so courteous, and his situation so lonely that 
we struck up an acquaintance with him anci in- 
vited him to share our Thanksgiving dinner — 
Janet this time taking the initiative. Clarence 
proved an inoffensive lad, traveling alone on 
a boat on which he had a cargo of canned 
goods. He had sold out most of the wares and 
was eating the remainder, trying to make up 
his mind whether to stay in Memphis, drift 
down the river, or go somewhere for a job. 
He seemed to take best to waiting. 

Janet let the yams cook for hours in the slow 
oven of our delapidated stove, till the sugar 
melted and recrystallized inside their skins; 
and in the late afternoon, with a can of corn 
contributed by Clarence, turned into a pudding, 

153 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

and with our steak rarely broiled and full of 
juice, we ate the most enjoyable Thanksgiving 
dinner of our memory. We gained much 
knowledge as we consumed it. Our comforta- 
ble companionship turned Clarence's mind to 
his own lonesome situation and he explained 
to us that he had not always been so. 

" I ain't had nobody to cook for me for some 
time," he said, contemplatively. "Ain't it queer 
about some women ? Now there was Mary — 
had a good home and a good man — I did n't 
beat her or nothing — had her own things, and 
plenty to eat, but she just could n't be satisfied. 
She always hankered to have a store of her 
own — on shore. She was fussy about mil- 
linery. Nothing to do but housekeeping, and 
yet forever thinking of nothing but hats. Noth- 
ing I could say did n't make no impression. 
She got me to give her a little money and 
she went ashore and set up a millinery shop 
for herself." 

Janet listened so well that he continued to 
" reminisce." 

" I done a lot for Mary, too. She was livin' 
in St. Louis, no work, nothing to do, winter 

154 



IN THE GREAT EDDY 

coming on, and crazy to travel. I liked her 
looks, so I let her bring her trunk aboard; she 
was pretty nigh a year traveling down the 
river with me." 

He sighed heavily over his loss and we led 
him on to more talk about our neighbors. I 
asked him about Blake, the Chickasaw medi- 
cine man. His boat lay on the other side of 
Clarence's, and he was even then one of the best- 
known characters on the river. Blake travels 
in style now, in a sternwheel gasoliner. But 
in those days he drifted in a tight little cabin 
boat, with his *' doctor " sign painted on the 
outer walls, and up and down the river he 
peddled the wonders of Chickasaw oil. Over 
beyond him was Thompson, a man from In- 
diana, traveling on his wedding journey and 
already a year out of port. Their baby was 
born in Memphis, and all Shanty-boat Town 
rejoiced with them. Thompson was trading 
brass jewelry to the Negroes and expected to 
reap a harvest when the cotton money came 
in. So did the man who came in next to him, 
and old graybeard from Jeffersonville, In- 
diana. This old chap and his wife ran a 

155 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

regular department store in their boat. The 
boat itself was no small affair, being fully 
sixty feet long and twenty broad and stoutly 
built. In the store part there were rows of 
calicoes on the shelves, trinkets in the show 
cases, cigars and tobacco, groceries of many 
sorts, and several barrels of apples. There 
were more apples in the " cellar," for the old 
man had loaded the hold full in Indiana at one 
dollar and a half a barrel. He was seUing apples 
at three for ten cents, large ones a nickel each 
(regular rates down there), so there was 
profit in the trade. He said the apples would 
pay for boat, stock and living, and leave the 
rest all profit. He had sold out, on the way 
down, his calicoes and most of the groceries, 
and was buying goods for the run to Vicks- 
burg. Kuykendahl, one of the best-known 
and most popular store-boatmen on the river, 
came in next to him, and farther along were 
the Belle of Dixie, Belle of Arkansas, and 
two or three other traders, stocking up. Each 
had his own particular district that he was 
aiming at; each catered to a particular kind 
of trade. They departed on different days, and 

156 



IN THE GREAT EDDY 

probably seldom came into competition. There 
was a dentist's chair on one of the boats, and 
one was fitted up with nickel-in-the-slot phono- 
graphs. And in among the others were many 
boats on whose roofs or decks were piled hoop- 
nets, seines and the other tools of the fisher- 
men. These were mostly bound for White 
river, where the sturgeon fishing was said to 
be good, and where " shovel-billed cat " was 
being sold to the canneries to be transmuted 
by commercial alchemy into pink canned sal- 
mon from the Columbia. 

There are many such communities as this on 
the river. Into them drift the riff-rafif as well 
as the elite of Shanty-boat Town; and though 
many visit back and forth, the line of socia- 
bility is really drawn almost as straightly in 
them as among similar folks ashore. There 
were doubtless thieves among us at Memphis. 
If so they did not steal from us. There may 
have been many there who were wanted by 
the law in other regions. Certainly boats came 
and went on which, our neighbors said snif- 
fingly, scandalous things took place. The 
river man is not rigid in his family relations. 

157 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

He recognizes the firmness of the tie only while 
it exists. He is as kindly to his helpmeet as a 
man on shore. And since he makes his own 
bargains and obeys his own laws regarding 
matrimony, he has a great contempt and no 
fellowship for those others who, afloat as 
ashore, make their way by loose living and 
barter and sale beyond the holy bonds. 

Clarence had worked for Espanto, the 
" Mexican Indian," and told us much about 
him — much that we were glad to know when 
at Lake Providence we came on the track of 
this wily individual, and at Vicksburg where 
we actually met him. But the chief point of 
interest which Clarence contributed was, after 
all, his own story. 

" I have been on the river three years," he 
said. " The first year you don't like it very 
well, but you think it 's easy. The second year 
you have your doubts about how much the 
river could do to you if it tried. The third year 
you 're in love with it but you ain't got no 
doubt you 're afraid of the river every minute, 
sleepin' or waking." From what we heard in 
other camps this seems to be a general summary 

158 




Interior of show-boat 



IN THE GREAT EDDY 

of the river psychology. We had a taste of 
this fear ourselves before we left Memphis. 

The river rose steadily until the gauge on 
the waterfront marked twenty-six feet above 
low water. By this time the great eddy was 
probably three quarters of a mile long and a 
quarter of a mile broad. Out beyond it the 
river rushed by with a steadily increasing speed 
amounting to about six miles an hour. Depart- 
ing from the main channel down near the levee 
the eddy swept with a slower motion up the 
willow side of the bar, turned and twisted, 
passed out by the mouth of Wolf river, went 
down the outer side again, and in some mys- 
terious manner found itself again in the chan- 
nel. But the great interior swirl was not 
always revolving so. The winds changed it, 
and without the winds it changed itself. Some- 
times it suddenly reversed. Sometimes it split 
in two and went both ways, leaving either a 
quiet spot or a maelstrom in the center. Quan- 
tities of drift logs were coming downstream, 
with stumps, boards and timbers. When the 
wind blew toward the eddy or was entirely 
still these came into it and swept slowly up 

159 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

and down it. If the wind was strong from 
south or west they made a menace for any- 
thing in the eddy and would have crushed us 
but for the trees behind which we were moored. 

The shanty-boaters along the levee were con- 
stantly on the watch for good logs which the 
wind brought into this backwater. Logs which 
were branded with the name of the owner could 
be returned to the big mills up Wolf river — 
the largest hardwood mills in the world — for 
twenty-five cents each. Logs unbranded were 
worth their timber value which was often sev- 
eral times that. Many of the loggers had a 
habit of chopping the brand off with an axe, 
but others were more honest. 

Every day huge rafts came down in tow of 
steamers, and were either impounded at Hen 
and Chickens or were swung into the eddy to 
check their way, and then pulled back up Wolf 
river to the mills. One morning, early in 
December, when a gale was blowing and the 
eddy had worked up quite a sea, the Vernie 
Mac came down with a tow of cottonwood and 
gum logs. The gums were in the majority and 
as they float deep they made the raft hard to 

1 60 



IN THE GREAT EDDY 

handle. The steamer swung it into the eddy 
and endeavored to check its way. The eddy 
was very deceptive. On this occasion it caught 
the raft and carried it down to the levee, then 
back up to Wolf river, the captain watching 
for a chance to drag it out. None offering on 
that round, he had to make another, and then 
another, each time getting near the center of 
the eddy. 

By this time all Shanty-boat Town was on 
the alert watching for the catastrophe. Clar- 
ence, our neighbor in the willows, had called 
me and we were bundling my tub of hawser 
into his skiff. As the steamer went around 
for the fourth time it reached the center and 
at the same moment the eddy, with a convulsive 
roar, reversed and split. 

Such a chaos of logs I have never seen be- 
fore or since. They shot up endways, singly 
and by the dozen. They fell over each other, 
and over the steamer. The captain of the 
Vernie Mac was glad enough to get his boat 
out whole. Then Shanty-boat Town, deliri- 
ously happy, made a simultaneous rush. Clar- 
ence and I in our skiffs were off with the first. 

i6i 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

In a moment along came a big section with 
a couple of dozen gum logs in it still bound 
together. We boarded it and rode down the 
eddy, around the foot and up again, watching 
for our chance. It came at last. While Clar- 
ence made one end of the line fast to a binder 
I shot for the willows in my skiff with the free 
end and snubbed it to the nearest tree that 
seemed large enough to hold. 

I was none too soon. The eddy was swift 
and the line came taut as I worked. It fouled 
an oarlock, and in the twinkling of an eye 
my skiff was whirled bottom up. I went into 
the icy water, but by great good fortune man- 
aged to catch my arms over some of the drift 
without going quite all under. There were 
stumps, logs, timbers and all manner of drift 
grinding around together in that whirlpool, 
and I did not at first see any very hopeful 
way out ; but by pulling myself over a log, and 
past a stump, and so gripping one piece after 
another as we floated up the eddy, I managed 
to come within a few feet of the stern of the 
Easy Way. 

White of face but quick of wit Janet stood 
162 



IN THE GREAT EDDY 

on the after deck with a coil of Hght Hne. This 
she threw with good aim across the stump to 
which I clung, and in a moment I was hauled 
in, none the worse for the wetting, and ready 
to join Clarence in the rescue of my skiff. 
We had caught the piece of raft. It almost 
pulled the tree loose, but the line held and the 
logs came to rest against the willows where 
we moored them and went out after more. In 
an incredibly short space of time that edd^ was 
cleared of sellable drift. Our share of it netted 
Clarence and I each ten dollars when the logs 
were turned over to their owner next day ; and 
Janet and I added that much to the earnings 
of our wedding journey. 



163 



CHAPTER X 

GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

From Memphis to Arkansas City is two hun- 
dred and ten miles measured in midstream, 
probably two hundred and forty as the channel 
winds. We made it in a week to the minute, 
better than thirty miles of traveling to the day, 
a week of as beautiful weather and as happy 
days as we knew on the whole river. 

It was on Tuesday, December eleventh, that 
we left Memphis. The river was falling and 
was at twenty-one feet. Clarence nearly 
grounded in the willows that day, staying 
in an hour too long, and we had to chop 
down two or three trees to get his boat out. 
On Tuesday morning he and I in our skiffs 
towed his '' shanty " tip above the mouth of 
Wolf river to a snug landing among the log 
rafts moored at Hen and Chickens, where he 
intended to work. And then at two in the 

164 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

afternoon, as soon as we had finished dinner, 
my wife cHmbed to the roof of the Easy Way, 
I cast off the hnes which held us to the outer 
fringe of trees, and the eddy bore us slowly up- 
ward and outward. We were about to try an 
experiment. During our stay at the willows 
I had borrowed a brace and bit from Clarence 
and mounted a pair of oarlocks on the corners 
of the forward deck. From Chicago to Mem- 
phis I had managed the Easy Way with a scull- 
ing oar at the stern. Now I stood on the deck 
with my two long sweeps in hand. As we came 
to the head of the eddy I dipped them in. With 
wonderful ease I felt the house boat swing out 
from the eddy into the main current, and a 
moment later we were again rushing down- 
stream toward the city, while from the shanty- 
boats along the bank a dozen hands waved us 
good luck. The river had lost its highwater 
swiftness but still had a strong current. We 
went under the railroad bridge without diffi- 
culty — the last bridge on the river — took 
Tennessee chute down the left side of Presi- 
dent's island, and saw the Bluff City fade away 
in the distance astern. There was no wind. I 

i6s 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

took in the sweeps and left the Easy Way to 
find her own channel, and climbing to the roof 
sat down beside Janet. Our wedding journey 
had begun again. This was no winter but as 
balmy and delicious an Indian summer as we had 
ever known. It was as soft as a spring day. 
It seemed as though on yonder bank flowers 
must be springing up. We had lost our dread 
of cold weather and of running ice, and were 
ready to enjoy the travel to the full. 

Wednesday was as fine as Tuesday, and 
Thursday followed in the same mood. We 
were away before sun-rise that day, and down 
Commerce cut-ofl!^ before the mists had entirely 
cleared from the river. We had a skiff with 
us now — the one we had bought at Memphis. 
It bobbed and bumped against the hull and was 
a great nuisance when there was any breeze, 
having a tendency to get under the guard and 
pound there till it jarred the whole cabin. But 
it was a comfort to have it just the same. It 
proved its use that Thursday, when, finding 
that we were needing oil, I took the can in the 
skiff as we made the crossing at M'Hoon's 
landing, and leaving my wife and the Easy 

i66 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

Way to drift, shot ahead to the nearest store, 
made my purchase and pursued and caught 
my run-away home and wife again. We passed 
Ship island that day, where Mark Twain's 
brother was lost, but which now was remarka- 
ble chiefly for an enormous flock of ducks 
which, when they flew, seemed like a cloud over- 
head, but when they turned and wheeled, 
showed a myriad of silvery tips — perhaps the 
silvery lining of the cloud. We passed Shoo 
Fly bar, where the river was miles broad, and 
met the sidewheel steamer James Lee away out 
in the middle, so far from shore we seemed to 
be in a great lake. Over on the Arkansas side 
the bank was caving, a forest covered bank. 
The crash of the falling trees came to us at 
first like distant thunder and we looked anx- 
iously for the clouds. None were in sight, and 
when the noise was repeated we were able to 
place it. Then in a little while as we came 
down toward " Old Bayou landing," we could 
see the majestic cottonwoods one by one sway- 
ing, waving their branches in frantic effort to 
regain their balance, and toppling with mighty 
roar into the destroying current. It was im- 

167 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

pressive, awe-inspiring. Night was swiftly 
coming on and we had not yet a camp in sight. 
We did not dare go near such a bank, and the 
other shore was a sandbar which with a fall- 
ing river was impossible. But our chart showed 
a tiny bayou which might hold our boat. We 
came in as close to the bank as we dared, 
passed the region of caving, swept in the dusk 
along a shore now so nearly hidden that we 
could not see the snags or eddies, but only 
hear the swirl of the impeded water. At last, 
dimly I made out a gap in the bank, and 
catching the sweeps swung the Easy Way out 
of the current into an eddy. Up with it we 
ran till at its head we came to a tiny creek. 
It was our bayou, and into it the Easy Way 
fitted as if they had been made for each other. 
There were twelve feet of water under us that 
night, and trees and vines pressed against our 
cabin from both sides. Four feet away, sepa- 
rated from us by so narrow a tongue of 
sharply cut bank, was the river current, or 
the tiny fringe of eddies that there bordered 
it. Steamers went by at night, and their 
waves beat against this little wall, but no 

i68 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

tremor shook the Easy Way, no ripple crossed 
the eddy below us to rock our house boat. 

" Away at daybreak," — how often that 
record appears upon our log. It was another 
of those ideal days. We waited for nothing, 
but as soon as we were awake, I moved the 
Easy Way out of her hiding-place into the 
current and left her to drift while we dressed 
and breakfasted. We went past the mouth 
of the St. Francis river while we sat at table, 
and had a glimpse of a score of fishing boats just 
within it. Not a breath of wind disturbed us. 
We had nothing to do but sit on deck and 
read and talk to one another as our boat pro- 
gressed, till at ten o'clock we came in sight 
of Helena. This is the only bluff town below 
Commerce, Missouri, on that side of the river, 
and even here the bluff is so far back from 
the river that it appears like a town in the 
bottomlands. 

That dreamy afternoon we let the house 
boat float as it would down a broad, (lelight- 
ful reach and " went rowing " in the skiff. 
For the first time we had an opportunity of 
viewing the Easy Way from a distance as it 

169 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

drifted, and imagining how we must look to 
those we passed. 

The sun had set and night was falHng as 
we made the last crossing to Old Town land- 
ing, Arkansas. Old Town bayou was dry, but 
on the bank beside it was pitched a tent, and 
in the eddy below it was a large-sized house 
boat. We pulled in above the foot of the 
crossing and put our lines on some half-sub- 
merged willows. As the Easy Way came to 
rest, out of the tent came marching a bulky 
figure, a bearded fat man, brandishing aloft 
a coffee pot, and singing in a voice as huge 
as himself: 

" Ya, ya, dis is de Garten of Eden 
Mitout any Eve." 

There was neither music nor rhythm to it, 
but it was evidently the outbursting of his 
native happiness. Janet and I — we who had 
so unwittingly introduced an Eve into the 
Garden — could not restrain our mirth. The 
old fellow heard us and stopped. In a mo- 
ment we had exchanged greeting. He, too, 
was from Chicago — an old friend of the 

170 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

Sturgeon King. In his tent on the bank he 
was as free and as happy as the original 
Teuton in the German wilds, while his helper, 
less fond of wild life, lived all alone in the 
shanty-boat. The old man had built his camp 
fire and was about to cook his supper. He had 
sturgeon, corn bread and coffee. What more 
could he want? And as for adventure, he 
had that in plenty, as we saw by a glance at 
two huge fish-skins hanging over a pole near 
him. They were alligator gars, the largest 
we had ever seen. 

No fish in southern waters, I think, is more 
dangerous in an encounter than this armored 
cruiser of the warm bayous. With scales 
which will turn a hatchet like so much polished 
iron- wood, and with jaws which would do 
credit to an alligator, equipped with long sharp 
teeth, he is a nasty customer to tackle at any 
time. " Our friend's friend," as we soon 
jokingly designated this acquaintance of the 
Sturgeon King, had had more than an ordi- 
nary struggle with these two. 

He had come to Old Town landing a week 
before, and casting around for a good place 

171 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

to trap sturgeon, had chanced upon Old Town 
lake, which lies a little way back in the bot- 
tom woods, and is a stretch of cut-off river, 
deep, full of cypress trees, and a haven for 
alligators and other such creatures. The stur- 
geon fisherman, seeking good eggs for the 
caviar market, set his gill nets in the lake by 
way of trial to see how the fish were run- 
ning, before trying more complex apparatus. 
Next morning he went out alone in a skiff to 
under-run them. To his amazement they were 
drawn under water, and he had dif^culty in 
getting hold of one of the lines. When he 
had done so, and had begun to haul in, he 
was even more surprised at the sudden rush 
with which the nets came toward him. 

The rush was cjuickly explained when up 
out of the water beside his skiff bobbed the 
long jaws of two huge alligator gars. Snap- 
ping and slashing about, they were tearing the 
nets in which they were entangled, and they 
were threatening by their struggles to overturn 
the skiff in which he sat. It was a moment of 
extreme peril. Unfortunately he had come out 
without a gun or pistol. A Negro helper was 

172 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

on the shore of the lake with a rifle, and to 
him he called for help. Then, with the only 
weapon at hand, a hatchet, he attacked the 
gars. Followed such a melee as one would 
not see twice in a lifetime, — a mix-up of 
floundering monsters, rocking boat, heavy 
Teuton, and entangling nets. The Negro was 
coming as fast as he could drive his skiff, but 
he came too late to help, for the fisherman 
had succeeded in finding a vulnerable spot in 
each gar's head, and had driven the hatchet 
deep into them. They sank from sight, but 
were still entanglecl in the net, and he was 
able to haul them to shore and so secure them. 
They were indeed monsters, as we saw when 
the skins were stretched before us. One 
measured a trifle over six feet in length, the 
other almost eight. They were old veterans 
of the bayou. 

The old fisherman explained to us that white 
folks did not eat gar-fish, but that the Negroes 
considered them as delicate as pork and were 
eager to get them. We were glad to hear 
this, for it took a load from our minds. At- 
tached to it is a joke on us which we have 

173 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

never told even our dearest enemies — but this 
is as good a place as any to let it out. 

As a matter of course, when we started 
down the river, we were well equipped with 
setlines, handlines and fish-hooks, and ex- 
pected to have fresh fish whenever we wanted 
it — though we are neither of us overfond of 
it. As we were not familiar with river fish- 
ing we took pains to acquire from others 
plenty of information about bait, about plac- 
ing the setlines, and about the favorite haunts 
of catfish and other denizens of the Missis- 
sippi. 

We made dough-balls by the hundred, and 
sat long, pleasant hours on the deck of the 
drifting Easy Way trailing them in the water 
to edify the carp, buffalo and catfish, which 
we wished to corral. Now and then we saw 
fishermen on the bank of the Illinois whip- 
ping the stream and hauling in three-pound 
black bass which were a treat to the eye. 
From a fike-netter we bought — at ten cents 
each — silver perch weighing two or three 
pounds, — delicious fish. In the Old Canal, 
using potato bait, we even had the good for- 

174 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

tune to catch carp, which were sweet and deH- 
cate. But after that our luck was nothing. 
I tore up rotten logs by the score for white 
grub worms, said to be an especial temptation 
to the catfish. My wife made dough-balls 
which were almost as good as doughnuts — 
or looked that way. Nightly, after mooring 
the house boat, I sought what seemed a proper 
spot, and set a nicely-baited trawl. We even 
wasted fresh meat and pork on it. But no 
fish came our way. 

At last, however, having set the line close 
to the Easy Way in an eddy, I was startled, 
delighted, cheered, one morning by finding 
what appeared to be a whale resisting my at- 
tempts to haul it in. I called Janet, who came 
on deck. Carefully I pulled in the trawl, and 
at last lifted a strenuously kicking fish to the 
deck. Another followed, his very mate, and 
then a third, of a dififerent style, not nearly so 
handsome, but larger. The third just touched 
the deck, got free and went away. The other 
two were ours. 

Ensued a tussle. With my bowie knife I 
attacked them, but two tougher fish it had 

175 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

never been my misfortune to meet. I think 
it must have taken me an hour to get their 
heads and hides off and their awful jaws back 
into the river. Then Janet took them and 
subjected them to the entendering influences 
of our kitchen stove. What she did I know 
not. I am sure it was orthodox, for at 
cookery she is expert. But it would have 
taken more than cookery to make those fishes 
tender and palatable. Heroically we ate them, 
for they were the first fruit of our setline. 
But we did not enjoy them so much as we 
did the joke which we conceived nature was 
playing on us. If these were catfish, deliver 
us! We let our setline lie in idleness there- 
after. But now as we stood on the bank at 
Old Town and gazed at the skins the Stur- 
geon Fisherman had caught, we knew the 
whole extent of the joke. For they were gars 
which we had caught — not alligator gars, but 
nice little hard-shell, sharp-tooth gars. We 
nudged each other and pointed out the familiar 
features of the big fellows. We did not tell 
the fisherman, but when he assured us that 
by some people the gars were considered deli- 

176 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

cacies we were restored to our good esteem 
again. 

Later, when we were nearly down to 
Natchez, we bought a catfish of a fisherman, 
and having it at home, recognized it as the 
counterpart of the one which had escaped the 
day we caught the gars. But we did not Hke 
catfish either and so were comforted. 

We were not the only people who did not 
know everything about river fishing. As we 
lay in the eddy at Old Town a young man in 
a skifif rounded in under our stern and asked 
for news of the Davis boys, from the upper 
river. We were able to tell him that they 
had gone on ahead. He had several nets in 
his skifif, and some camping outfit, and had 
come from Iowa to overtake his friends. They 
were bound for White river, whither he was 
eager to start. He stayed for supper, how- 
ever, as he was out of provisions. 

" You petter stay hier py me," said our 
Teutonic friend to him. " I gives you work, 
yet." 

" No, I 'm going to White river." 

" Vite river ? My poy, I peen dere. Dey 
177 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

ees more fishermen as dey ees fish at White 
river." 

" That 's all right," declared the self-confi- 
dent lowan. " I '11 show 'em a thing or 
two. I 've got something here that '11 wake 
'em up." 

"Hey? Wat you got?" 

" Box nets, — that 's what I got." 

"Pox nets, hey? Pox nets?" The old 
German stared in a sudden amazement. Then 
as the young fellow floated out into the cur- 
rent the old chap went into a paroxysm of 
merriment. 

" Ach ! Golly ! " he cried when he could 
catch his breath. " He got pox nets. He 
show dem somedinks at the Vite river." He 
straightened up and pointed to a pile of crates 
on the bank. 

"You see t'ose crates? I pring dem all 
down from Chicago wit' more as a t'ousand 
dollars vort' of seines. Dey is de best seines 
on de river. And I cut all dem up to make 
pox nets long ago." 

He slapped his knees and sat down in simple 
inability to laugh enough. " Pox nets," he 

178 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

spluttered. '' Py golly! Ain't he a smart fel- 
ler? He got pox nets. I pet he show dem 
old fishermen lots of dinks." 

" Saturday, December fifteenth. Away at 
dawn; another fine day." This was that 
memorable day when, in spite of a falling 
river, we went down the shallow chute between 
Island Sixty-two and its towhead, and a little 
later, seeing the big sidewheeler Kate Adams 
coming over a crossing toward us, shot into 
the chute of Sixty-six, and found a current 
that did our hearts good. That chute was a 
real terror. A barrier of snags and stumps 
seemed almost to block the way. The shore 
of the island was a white sand-bank, horrid 
with broken timbers. The chute was crooked. 
But past all obstacles we tore at tremendous 
speed. Someone's cornfield had been going 
into the river as the water fell — in fact a 
good many cornfields had. So all along the 
line of eddies were to be seen the fragments 
from them. We captured an excellent big 
squash. We found the lower end of the 
chute more pleasant, but when we had come 
into the river again, at sunset, there was a 

179 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

long, straight stretch of broad channel, which 
made us wish we had stayed in the narrow 
stream for a camping place. We ran down 
the Arkansas side, and fomid a high, terraced 
bank overgrown with grass and willows, which 
proved an excellent mooring as long as the 
wind held slack. And as it did hold slack 
until we got away in a dense fog at ten 
o'clock next morning, we had nothing to 
bother us. 

We had been very fortunate, so far, in 
avoiding the " levee " camps along the river. 
Work on the enormous earthen dams which 
restrain the flood waters is continually going 
on. At intervals along the way are camps 
where Negro laborers are housed in tents. To 
these camps commonly drift the ugliest and 
most criminal of their race — graduates from 
the convict camps being numerous in them. 
Gambling and drinking and quarreling pass 
away the idle hours, and murders are common 
occurrences. We had an experience this Sun- 
day morning which amazed us and showed us 
what they might be like; for the fog held us 
to the Arkansas bank which did not happen 

i8o 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

to be the channel side, and we went down 
behind a towhead, and from the bank the 
Negro men and women reviled us, shouted 
curses and taunts and threats and unprint- 
able things at us, and gave us very good 
reason to be glad that we were afloat on our 
own boat and quickly to be hidden in the 
fog. 

Chutes, chutes, chutes — we went down two 
this day again, running the short cut behind 
Island Sixty-nine, and a little later another 
behind Seventy, and in the latter made our 
camp. Next day we ran the chute of Scrub 
Grass towhead, — a crooked way, cutting off 
quite a piece of bend for us, but leaving us 
uncertain till the last minute whether there 
would be water enough for us all the way 
through. That day we passed, almost with- 
out seeing them, the double mouth through 
which the White and the mighty Arkansas, 
united, flow into the Mississippi, — the upper 
in the forenoon, the lower in the afternoon; 
and in between I left my wife to drift reck- 
lessly away in the little house while I paddled 
to shore and ran a mile or more back inland 

i8i 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

to the depot at Rosedale to mail an important 
letter, and then back to the landing and after 
her in swift pursuit. 

We had made nearly forty miles that day 
when we rounded Caulk's point, and, drifting 
down the off-channel side, sought a mooring. 
The ground against which we ran looked firm 
enough, and we had had no previous experi- 
ence with mud banks from which the river 
has just dropped away. I caught up stake, 
axe and mooring line and leaped — ashore ? 
Oh, no. Down! I was almost waist deep in 
the slimy mud when I caught the edge of the 
deck, and with Janet's help extricated myself. 
We went farther downstream and fared better. 

Next day we came to Arkansas City; but 
before we had quite arrived there we heard 
the final word of the Frenches. From the 
bank above the last bend a stranger hailed us. 

" Hey, Jim ! Jim ! " he shouted as we 
drifted by. 

" Whom do you want ? " I asked. 

" I want Jim French. Ain't that his boat? " 

" No. He left Memphis a week ahead of 
us." 

182 




The ark and the arkitect 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

" Sure he ain't on board ? " 

'' Plumb sure." 

" Wal, — Id' know. Jim said he was comin' 
down on that there boat. Told me so hisself 
up on the Illinois. I d' know why he ain't 
with you-all." And he shook his head sus- 
piciously as if we had made away with James, 
or were concealing him for purposes of ran- 
som. Janet and I grinned at each other in 
ghoulish glee at this confirmation of our con- 
jectures regarding the persistent brothers. 

Half an hour later — a week to the hour 
since we had left the willows at Memphis — 
I drove an oar deep into a mud-flat some dis- 
tance out from the levee at Arkansas City, 
moored our house boat to it, and we went 
ashore in the skifif for mail and exploration. 

Several years afterward, when I happened 
to be a witness in a federal court, the lawyer 
who cross-examined me endeavored to test my 
knowledge of the Mississippi, and began with 
Arkansas City. 

*' Do you know where it is? " he demanded, 
with quivering finger. 

I did. 

183 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

"Well — tell us what it is like!" he 
snapped. 

I told him. Not a detail of the picture did 
I omit, — the scene, that is, as we first looked 
upon it. Mud, jews, niggers and hogs — there 
was nothing else. There, behind the levee, 
lay the very worst, muddiest imitation of a 
town we had ever seen. A number of stores 
and houses — ramshackle wooden affairs set 
upon posts — sheltered droves of hogs which 
rooted in the mud. There were hogs in the 
mud-lanes that served for streets. Niggers 
sunned themselves on the store galleries, while 
Israelites, of that hateful type which prevails 
in the dark land, smiled greasily upon them 
and solicited trade. There was a postoffice 
in a store. We went to it and found some 
mail, and walked gingerly over a piece of plank 
walk to a wood back of town where there 
were palmettoes — the first we had seen — 
peeping above the grass. We had sent some 
fiction stories to McClure's from New Madrid. 
And in our letter at this muddy place we 
found the answers. They were accepted — 
our first real acceptance. How little that edi- 

184 



GOOD TRAVELING DAYS 

tor chap back in New York knew what that 
message meant to us! We walked down the 
course of an old bayou and around through 
the beautiful woods. As we came back 
through town the darkies grinned at us like 
the good old southern darkies that they were. 
The Hebrews smiled ingratiatingly upon us 
as upon folks who had succeeded; and the 
very hogs seemed now but incarnate wealth! 
We walked along the levee and fell into con- 
verse with a Chicago man there. We went 
down to the shore, shoved off in our skiff, and 
were soon aboard the Easy Way. And then, 
from a government steamer, moored nearby, 
came a glad hail, and there was Billy L., the 
one man we knew south of the Ohio river. 

No meeting could have been more remark- 
able than that. Billy had been a classmate of 
mine, as a freshman, ten years before this. 
I had not seen him since. He lived somewhere 
in Kentucky. When we started south, how- 
ever, we often told inquisitive acquaintances 
that we were going south " to see Billy L.," 
and the fiction never failed to amuse us. 

And here in Arkansas City we did meet 
185 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

Billy. He was a civil engineer in government 
employ and, with Captain Walbridge on the 
Patrol, was inspecting guages for the last 
time before the winter. He found us a safe 
harbor for the Easy Way, and we lay there 
that night, after an evening of pleasure on 
the government steamer begun with a good 
dinner and ended with good yarns. 

We were gone next morning, running hastily 
for " The Bends." But as we sailed away 
we remembered the glorious mud of Arkansas 
City, the prosperous hogs, the jolly Uncle Tom 
Negroes and the business-like Hebrews, and 
the old place took on a radiance which still 
enshrouds it and which covers its unlovely 
aspect as a magic veil. 



i86 



CHAPTER XI 

WE COME TO VICKSBURG 

It would be a sorry trespass upon the patience 
of the reader were I to attempt to chronicle 
all the days that passed as we drifted down 
the Father of Waters. They are all there in 
my Logbook; an entry for each of them, de- 
tailing all that is necessary to recall to us the 
lightest incidents. But in this reach of the 
river from Arkansas City to Vicksburg there 
was at least one event that I cannot pass 
lightly by, — an event so horrible that it cast 
a shadow on more than two hundred miles of 
our journey and gave us a new knowledge 
of the perils through which we were almost 
unconsciously passing. 

We left Arkansas City on a windy day and 
ran down to the first of the famous " Bends " of 
the river. Here, above Greenville, the great 
stream twists itself into a series of convolu- 
tions outdoing anything it has elsewhere at- 

187 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

tained. We lay for three days stormbound 
at Georgetown bend, sharing anchorage with 
a red-bearded Swedish sailor who was mak- 
ing his way north to Chicago in a trim little 
sloop. Then towing around the bends behind 
a great ash tree, we weathered a gale on 
Bachelor's Bend towhead, opposite Greenville, 
and on the next day, the second before Christ- 
mas, ran down to Lakeport. It was there the 
distressing news reached us. I have spoken 
of the Thompsons, small traders, who had left 
Memphis ahead of us. They had come down 
this far, trading along the way, and just below, 
at Arcadia landing, had tied up for the holi- 
days. They had had heavy bills at Memphis 
and Mr. Thompson was anxious for money- 
making trade, so he had tied up at a landing 
where a levee was being built and the Negroes 
were encamped. At once they crowded the 
boat and money began to flow into the till. 
It is an invariable custom on the river to shut 
off such trade and close the doors before dark. 
I have known traders traveling in partnership 
who never opened their doors to friend or foe 
after dark; and I have known others whose 



WE COME TO VICKSBURG 

custom it was for one to stay in the rear 
room, covering the front door with a rifle 
while his partner unbarred it, in order that 
they might have an advantage over any in- 
truder. Yet, understanding the necessity of 
these precautions, Mr. Thompson left his doors 
open until after nightfall, in his "desire to get 
the most of this opportunity. 

There were several nickel-in-the-slot phono- 
graphs in the cabin. These interested the 
darkies immensely. Toward nine o'clock, when 
but two darkies remained on board, these called 
to Mr. Thompson that a phonograph was out 
of order. Foolishly, he put the pieces in his 
ears and bent over it. Instantly one drew Mr. 
Thompson's revolver from his hip pocket and 
shot him through the back of the head. Their 
motive was robbery, but they got very little. 
Returning later, they killed Mrs. Thompson, 
leaving the baby alive in the bed. The shanty- 
boat, with kerosene sprinkled about, and all 
aflame, was shoved out into the stream. The 
Thompson family had been blotted out. 

Next day, with incredible swiftness, the 
truth came out. White men hastily sum- 

189 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

moned from distant plantations, shanty-boat- 
men called ashore by a peremptory summons, 
made up an armed guard. Nineteen Negroes 
lined up before a grassy levee faced death. 
At another toll the volley would have rung 
out which would have wiped them all out. 
Suddenly one of them gave way and named 
the murderers. Quickly they were seized, 
quickly they confessed. In ten minutes their 
bullet-ridden bodies hung from a tree, the mob 
dispersed, and armed guards drove the sullen 
laborers about their work. 

This was the news the BcIIc of the Bends 
brought us, and with it the word was passed 
to river folks to beware of the Mississippi 
shore; for two hundred miles, it was said, 
the blacks were sullen and ugly. We would 
do well to avoid them. 

. We had another sort of adventure at Lake- 
port ourselves, which taxed our pride. The 
long days of delay at the Bends had told 
heavily on our larder. For seventy-two hours 
the wind blew about us, often whirling the 
snow against our windows. In the cabin we 
worked industriously at our newspaper stories, 

190 



WE COME TO VICKSBURG 

our commercial report — and in interims 
played games and read. But this did not 
extend the larder, and the food we had laid 
in at Arkansas City to last us to Lake Provi- 
dence rapidly disappeared. Lake Providence 
was the nearest check, and we had not a sou 
in the cabin. 

Landing at Lakeport on the morning before 
Christmas day, I set out to look for work, to 
earn a Christmas dinner. Vain search. The 
great plantation was idle for the holidays. In 
the office a mile from the landing the mana- 
ger sat at his desk dealing out Christmas 
money and supply-orders to the Negroes. 
There was no work for anyone until the holi- 
days were over. 

Wandering back toward the landing, I en- 
countered a handsome young chap of my own 
age galloping along on horseback. Him also 
I accosted and asked for a job. Nothing to 
be had. We talked for a few minutes, and 
I discovered to my joy that he was a Har- 
vard man. I stated my case. He thrust his 
hand into his pocket and drew out a bill, and 
without hesitation passed it over. 

191 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

*' Borrow this," he said. I did borrow it, 
gladly, and sent it back to him from the next 
check we received. It bought our Christmas 
dinner at a store boat on the bank nearby, 
and carried us on to Lake Providence, where 
mail and money were awaiting us. 

Under the shadow of the Thompson news 
we left Lakeport, intending to keep to the 
Arkansas shore for landing; but almost im- 
mediately below town we were caught by a 
strong offshore wind which, in combination 
with a crossing current, swept us to the Mis- 
sissippi side. The wind was too strong for 
traveling, and we were driven into a big 
pocket eddy, — a scallop in the bank perhaps 
one hundred and fifty feet across, in which 
the current slowly revolved upstream. Such 
an eddy is often quiet for hours after the 
river outside begins to roughen with a heavy 
wind, and so we found this one. The bank 
was sloping and stable, about thirty feet high, 
of black alluvium throughout ; and we moored 
on the upper side. In the late afternoon, the 
eddy growing rough, I pulled stakes and 
dragged the boat around to the lower side of 

192 



WE COME TO VICKSBURG 

the same scallop, preparing to spend the night. 
Janet had come out on the deck, and I had 
stopped, stake and line in hand, to speak to 
her, when a light splash attracted our atten- 
tion. A lump of dirt had fallen in. 

Instantly we stood petrified. The whole 
bank, moored to which we had spent the day, 
was settling out of sight before our eyes. In 
absolute silence after that first splash, with 
scarcely a tremor, it split — nearly half an 
acre of it — loose from the mainland, and 
without tipping or breaking, settled majestic- 
ally into the water. The channel at its face 
was seventy-five feet deep; into it that im- 
mense mass of earth disappeared, leaving not 
a ripple nor an eddy to mark its place. The 
whole force of the river swept down on our 
new mooring place. For a moment we were 
too frightened to move — and then, with my 
undriven stakes I jumped aboard, and, aided 
by a lull in the wind, after an hour of strenu- 
ous labor, succeeded in rowing the house across 
to the bar on the Arkansas side. It was a 
restless night. The river was falling. We 
might be hopelessly stranded before morning. 

193 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

With the pancake-turner for a shovel, I buried 
a " dutchman " — a walnut log I was carrying 
for firewood — and moored the boat to it. 
Every hour of the night I got up and lifted 
the boat off the bank into the receding water. 
And at daylight on Christmas day we had 
just enough water riverward from us to scrape 
through into the open channel. 

And so came Christmas day, — a day of 
loneliness, of worry, of hunger for home folks 
— and in the end of happiness, of delight, and 
of victory over the spirit that is memorable 
in the journey. 

Mail stations were far apart down there, 
and mail was often missent or entirely lost. 
In one town the postmistress ate the entire 
contents of a box of candy, rewrapped it and 
delivered to us the empty box. With the ir- 
regular schedule and the bad service, Christ- 
mas messages could not possibly reach us. 
We had not a gift to give or to receive. The 
old river had given us a bad fright, and the 
Thompson affair was heavy on our nerves. 
Our finances were so low as to depress us, 
and poor Janet carried a big lump in her 

194 



WE COME TO VICKSBURG 

throat as she prepared breakfast that 
morning. 

We were coming into an unknown part of 
the river, through the Grand Eddy against 
which we had been warned, and then down 
into the head of Stack Island reach, which 
was another worry; and though we did not 
confess it then, the early morning found us, 
for perhaps the first time, wishing for our 
families for company. 

Yet see how nature played a trick upon us. 
The day was magical. There was no wind. 
The sun was warm, the temperature like an 
ideal Indian summer day. We escaped from 
the bar, ran around a long bend and made a 
crossing. We consulted the chart. Amazing 
circumstance! We were in Mathews' bend. 
The place was made for us. A star in the 
channel showed that for the first time the 
bottom of the river was below the level of 
the Gulf of Mexico, — a sign that we were 
nearing the end. We came to Grand Eddy, 
Janet on the roof scanning for peril, I at the 
sweeps ready for action. Free from wind, 
the Easy Way, of her own accord, sought the 

195 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

downstream current. On both sides of us, 
so that if I had dipped the sweeps they would 
have been in them, were two swift upstream 
swirls rushing past us, yet the downstream 
swirl on which we were held us safely in its 
keeping. Past it, entered on the broad, safe 
reach that leads past Leota landing and Grand 
lake, and so down into Louisiana bend, we 
brought our chairs to the roof and as a tramp 
friend expressed it, " just enjoyed." 

Before the noontime we had another addi- 
tion to our stock of Christmas pleasure. A 
big tree overhung the bank, half fallen, and 
covered with mistletoe. I brought the boat 
ashore and climbed the leaning trunk. It was 
a prize we got, — a mass of the most magnifi- 
cent mistletoe we had ever possessed, a single 
stem whose branches, laden with berries, could 
not have been crowded into a bushel basket. 
I brought that into the cabin and put it to its 
best use, — hanging it later over the table, — 
and much refreshed in spirit, we ascended to 
the roof again and went adrift. 

There was no goose upon the Christmas 
table — and a mighty simple meal it was. But 

196 



WE COME TO VICKSBURG 

we ate it under the mistletoe, with the doors 
and windows open, with the water rippHng 
lightly just within arm's reach through the 
sash, with the song of birds about us; we sat 
there a long time listening to the water's voice 
and watched the distant shores. Christmas 
had come to us and our hearts were full of it. 

A man came down to the water's edge in 
Arkansas and shouted to the Mississippi shore. 
"Ahoy! Hello! The other side! " 
It was a musical hail, and for an hour he 
kept it up ; but no one save echo and a dog re- 
plied. He hailed us and asked me to put him 
over, but it meant fully eight miles of rowing 
while my wife drifted helplessly on in the Easy 
Way, and I dared not risk it. We left him 
shouting over the wide river, and then, sitting 
on oru- roof, singing happily as on that day on 
the Illinois, with cobwebs again streaming from 
our roof, as on that other day, we came down 
into Louisiana bend, where for the first time 
Arkansas gave place to Louisiana on the right 
bank of the river. Louisiana! In that State 
was New Orleans. This was our Christmas 
gift, and we found it a welcome one. 

197 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

As we came down into the foot of the bend and 
made swift progress through a chute toward 
the Mississippi shore again, it was early dusk. 
In the darkness under the distant bank a spark 
twinkled, and stopped. Soon we could dimly 
see a boy on the bank, toward which the current 
strongly pressed us — and a moment later 
flashed out a beacon which he had come to light. 
For hours we had not seen a house, nor heard 
a voice except that of a man hallooing. We 
were in a dense wilderness. But here with us, in 
it, was a boy and his signal, one of those faithful 
beacon tenders who nightly light the flames 
that make the Mississippi safe for commerce 
from its head to the sea. It seemed as if we 
were guests, now, for whom special thought had 
been taken. The little lantern gleaming out at 
us was for us, to guide us to our haven. And 
that night when we had made harbor on a tow- 
head in midstream, the little light still shone 
across at us, as though it had been set there to 
give us Christmas cheer. 

We needed comfort and security that night. 
In the south cotton money comes in at Christ- 
mas, and the Negroes have then the fireworks 

198 



WE COME TO VICKSBURG 

which in the north are sent up on the Fourth 
of July. We discovered, when it was too late 
to move, that there was a camp of them, all 
drunk, on the lower end of the towhead. 

They were sending up fireworks while they 
sent down firewater. We hid our boat carefully 
and I watched most of the night, but no one 
came to disturb us. Another day brought us 
to Lake Providence, and from there we traveled 
" double team " with Billy Mason, gambler. 

It would be difficult to say which is the more 
vivid to-day, our memory of Lake Providence 
or our recollection of Billy Mason. The town 
was a quaint, quiet southern town, set on the 
shore of one of those moon-shaped lakes which 
are bits of old river channel. The lake was bor- 
dered by venerable cypress, and had we wished 
we could have moved our boat over to it, by a 
heavy haul overland, and have floated from it 
down the quiet reaches of the bayou Tensas 
to the Red river. We spent a week there and 
often in the evening walked out and enjoyed 
the sight of that curving, cypress-bordered lake. 

But Billy Mason was no whit less pictur- 
esque. He was "on the bank," as the phrase 

199 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

goes, when we came, living with his wife, his 
dog, his cat and his boy, in a brand new tent. 
They had been caught here in the gale we 
weathered at Greenville, thrown broadside on 
a mud shore and swamped. They had rescued 
their furniture and were waiting for the boat 
to dry out. Billy was a gambler, by profession 
and by instinct. I remember walking with him 
later up Washington street, in Vicksburg. We 
came upon a gambler running a shell game by 
the sidewalk. Billy hailed him in an undertone : 

" How about this town? " he asked. 

" Who are you ? " demanded the other. 

" A grifter — like yourself." 

"What's your lay?" 

" Gallery, canes and wheel. Can I fix it? " 

'^ Sure — look at me ! Fix anything here ! 
But there 's two gangs, county and city. Got 
to fix police and sheriff too." 

" Not for mine," said Billy, as he walked 
away. " No county seat jobs for me when 
there's small town pickings in cotton time. 
This double game is too costly, and besides 
each side is jealous for fear you paid the other 
more than you did him." 

200 



WE COME TO VICKSBURG 

In Lake Providence Billy had his shooting 
gallery set up in a store on the main street, 
and spent his days there. He was looking for 
someone to come along — as we had done — 
with whom he could double for the trip through 
the '' bad " region. He was a " character," 
a novelist's man. He was long, thin, saturnine. 
He was reputed a dead shot, and a quick man 
to anger. H he had a tender side, he kept it 
for display to the little puppy and kitten which 
he carried about, one head out of each side 
pocket, and which, whenever he stopped, he set 
down to play at his feet. Most shanty-boaters 
require their wives to work the sweeps which 
propel the boat to and from shore. Billy had 
a half-witted son ; and used him instead. He 
had a long and narrow boat with a sternwheel 
turned by a handcrank and to this the boy fur- 
nished the motive power. 

Mrs. Mason, Billy's latest wife, was a Ger- 
man woman, apparently capable and sensible. 
While Billy ran his gambling works up town, 
she was busy cleaning out the cabin and drying 
her possessions. 

We spent a week there, in which I wrote the 

20I 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

report I had contracted for in Chicago and 
mailed it back. Then on a bright, still morning, 
we drifted away in company with Mason, trav- 
eling in team for greater safety. Mrs. Mason, 
returned to her home^ had baked the day be- 
fore and presented us with a loaf of delicious 
bread, a welcome addition to our scanty stock. 
The two boats floated along within a mile of 
each other for day after day, through Milli- 
ken's bend and down past Duckport landing, 
and so at last a week or ten days after leaving 
Lake Providence, we passed the old mouth of 
the Yazoo and rounding a long bend came to 
Kleinston where we entered the canal which 
leads to Centennial lake and the city front of 
Vicksburg. 

Thus ended the second phase of our journey, 
in which travail and striving, the hard effort 
of meeting and passing through the almost des- 
perate situations in which we more than once 
found ourselves, the ultimate triumph over 
them, created a new capacity in us and opened 
for us a new path leading to a broader 
philosophy. 



202 



CHAPTER XII 

VICKSBURG AND HARD LABOR 

Three is the mysterious number which seems 
to have associated itself with our journey. 
There were three geographical stages — the 
Old Canal, the Illinois, and the Mississippi. 
There were three seasons — the delightful au- 
tumn, the hurrying, stormy winter, and the 
wonderful spring. And there were three 
epochs — Before Vicksburg, Vicksburg, and 
After Vicksburg. In the days of the first period 
we were earning our precarious livelihood by 
fits and starts, rich to-day and poor to-morrow, 
but always managing to keep a sufficiency on 
hand — till we arrived at Vicksburg, free of 
the worry of our main task (ended at Lake 
Providence), and also free of groceries both 
green and staple. We were tired of fried corn 
and mush. After Vicksburg we were pluto- 
crats, with money in the bank and with an 
ample supply for all contingencies stored away 

203 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

in our purse with us. We could abandon the 
boat at any town and go home in style on train 
or steamer. But in Vicksburg, where we made 
the transition from ante to post we toiled for 
our daily bread with an earnestness that was 
amusing in spite of its reality. 

That first morning when we arrived I has- 
tened to the postoffice with Mason, in confi- 
dent expectation of finding three hundred dol- 
lars awaiting us. The best-laid plans went 
agley again. Not so much as a scrawl of paper 
was there for us. I fingered my last quarter 
lonesomely in my pocket and wondered what 
would happen next. Mason, who admired what 
he called my " gift of gab," sizing up the situ- 
ation, saw an opportunity to reopen an ofTer 
he had made before, and besought me to 
" double " with him in business as well as in 
friendly travel, and to help manage his 
" square " games on even shares. " We could 
skin the hide off any nigger in the valley," he 
said. It was a tempting offer, considering the 
state of our finances, but I had not come to 
the point where a position as assistant faker 
appealed to me as being more gentlemanly than 

204 



VICKSBURG AND HARD LABOR 

the honest toil of a mechanic. Here on every 
side were as good men as I, working with their 
hands; and while my hands were whole and 
my muscles as strong as months at the sweeps 
could make them I had no doubt of my ability 
to do the same. 

The canal which we had entered on our arri- 
val was a new one being cut for the govern- 
ment by two huge dredges that were working 
less than a half mile from our mooring. A 
naphtha launch from South Haven, Michigan, 
was busy towing coal-flats to and fro, and the 
captain, an acquaintance of the Memphis eddy, 
told us that more help was needed. A little 
way up from the mooring of the Easy Way 
stood the plain board shanty which served for 
the temporary headquarters of this section of 
the Atlantic, Gulf and Pacific dredging com- 
pany. A single inquiry gave me the informa- 
tion that Captain Nelson was the " boss " of the 
job. And to a big, gigantic, fair-haired Swede 
in the shanty I forthwith addressed myself. 

*' Captain Nelson? " I asked. 

" Yes, — that 's me." 

" I want work." 

205 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

"What can you cio?" — looking me over 
carefully. 

" Anything an untrained man with muscles 
can do, I reckon. I 've muscles to spare." 

" Yes, — I bet you can. Well, you go to 
work Monday morning at seven o' clock. Re- 
port at dredge Number 5, to Mr. Yorcke, the 
engineer, and tell him I sent you up as coal- 
passer. That '11 be fifty-one dollars a month — 
one dollar held out for doctor." 

" By the way. Captain Nelson," said I, " I '11 
need a little in the way of advance from time 
to time. Can I draw before the month? I 
have my family with me." 

A young man in the background looked up 
at this and eyed me even more carefully than 
the larger Nelson had done. 

" That 's all right," he said pleasantly, at 
last. " Will ten dollars fix you up for the 
present? " 

" Excellently," said I. 

He drew a pile of bills from a drawer and 
selected a ten, which he handed to me, after 
writing my name down on a time sheet and 
making the entry. Wherever he may be to-day, 

206 



VICKSBURG AND HARD LABOR 

there breathes no man to whom I am more 
sincerely grateful, than I am to that little cap- 
tain of Number 5 — Joe Titzel, than whom 
no chief was ever better loved by a hard-work- 
ing crew. With a fuller pocket and a lighter 
heart I went on to the Easy Way and told Janet 
our fortune. She rejoiced in it, heartily. What 
" coal-passer " might be we neither of us knew. 
That this would be hard work we did not doubt 
— but I did not doubt either that whatever any 
other man could do I could do, and, in a short 
time, as well as he. So we spent the afternoon 
and the next day in sight-seeing, making a trip 
to Centennial lake and the National Cemetery 
in the naphtha launch, and on Monday morning 
I took my tin dinnerpail in hand and fared 
away to the scene of my labors, while Janet, 
transformed into as cheery a workingman's 
wife as ever packed a lunch, waved me God- 
speed from the forward deck and then hastened 
in opposite direction on a marketing tour. 

Dear reader, did you ever shovel coal? Yes? 
Into a coal hod? Yes? Well, this was an 
entirely different thing. Did you ever go down 
into the cellar on a dark night and try to force 

207 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

the blunt edge of the shovel into a tangled heap 
of bituminous lumps over the edge of the 
bunker ? Yes ? Well, this was worse than that. 
Imagine a mass of coal extending from the 
bulkhead of the firehold to the after end of 
the ship — perhaps twenty feet — and the full 
width of the hull, and up to the deck beams, 
except where it sloped down a little in front. 
Imagine facing that awful coal pile at seven 
in the morning, and having a heavy, business- 
like scoop thrust into your hand, and being 
told to begin shoveling that heap away and to 
keep shoveling till six o'clock that night, and 
if you get lunch at all to eat it in between 
shovelfuls. 

Then imagine attacking that frowning pile, 
that Gibraltar of black diamonds, and trying 
to guide the great scoop in and out through 
the mazes of that tangle. Imagine yourself 
struggling for five minutes that seemed hours 
to get a shovelful, while a fireman looked scorn- 
fully on, and drawing it out to find one measly 
little piece on the steel blade. 

Then conceive that when you were busy at 
that, and the fireman with no compassion for 

208 



VICKSBURG AND HARD LABOR 

your greenness kept calling violently '' More 
coal, more coal, there. Coal-passer," — that 
then all of a sudden a burly gang of deck 
hands appeared against the skyline overhead, 
and shouted : 

" Come on, now, send up them ashes. Lively, 
now. We can't wait all day." And then, when 
they found you had n't even raked them out of 
the pit, they stood over you and swore till the 
Chief came and swore too, and even the fire- 
man cursed a little. You got a long-handled 
hoe that weighed a ton or more and went to 
work dragging out the ashes and found that 
they were all watersoaked and heavy. You 
hauled and pulled till they were brought from 
the farthest recesses and piled up on the iron 
floor in front of the five doors of the furnace, 
and then from nowhere in particular dropped 
a big iron bucket with sides unnecessarily high, 
and you had to shovel those ashes into it. Over- 
head the deck hands still cursed and cried for 
haste. The soggy ashes grew momentarily 
heavier. Your back, already worn and aching 
with the easier swing of the coal, refused to 
respond longer to your demand for an up and 

209 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

down motion to lift these tons of debris into 
the maw of the pail. Up and down went the 
bucket till at last you threw in the last ton, and 
began to breathe freely, when from somewhere 
aloft came a loud and oath-assisted voice: 

" Well, for sake, ain't you put no water 

in them pits? Do you want to burn up this 

boat, you lunkhead? Get the hose now 

and souse them ash-pits." 

Imagine that you had got the hose, and were 
to the best of your ability sousing " them ash- 
pits " when from a different quarter another 
voice broke out: 

" Here, you Coal-passer. Don't get any 

of that water on my grate bars, I don't want 
them breaking." 

A moment later: " ! Have I 

got to wait all day for MORE COAL? 
MORE COAL, YOU!" 

Ah, well, imagine all that if you can. But 
stop — there 's another side to it. Remember, 
while you 're imagining, that a rough and ready 
fireman, seeing your back stop swinging, pushed 
you aside with sudden kindness and attacked 
the ashpile, with: 

2IO 



VICKSBURG AND HARD LABOR 

" Here, old man, let me give you a lift." 
Imagine that after a while you got down 
to the bottom of that coal pile, adjacent to the 
bulkhead, and could shovel along the floor. In 
a little while you grew so accustomed to shov- 
eling that you cast aside the number three 
scoop that had seemed so enormous and took 
to a number seven, and then to the big number 
nine that had loomed threateningly in the offing 
when you first came aboard. 

Imagine that at evening, when you were 
worn to a frazzle, the fireman showed you 
where to get a bucket of hot water and a cake 
of soap, and you stood on a running plank over 
the firehold and sousled yourself from head 
to foot till you felt refreshed and clean again. 
And then — but no, you can't imagine the " and 
then," for there is only one Janet. But try 
to imagine as well as you can that you stepped 
into a punt alongside, caught the sculling oar 
in one hand, and swiftly, with an old familiar 
twirl, went toward your house boat floating just 
astern. As you came toward it you whistled, — 
just softly, " whee-whoo," — and the back door 
flew open and out leaned the dearest head and 

211 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

over the water came an answering " whee- 
whoo," and the head bobbed back inside; and 
a second later when you drew alongside and 
peeked in, the dearest woman in the world was 
just putting a platter of steak and a big dish 
of mashed potatoes and a pot of tea on the 
table, where the rest of the supper was already 
waiting it. 

Who cares for a day's work? It 's a man's 
job. It 's what we all do. Who cares if he 
does shovel heaven knows how many tons of 
coal in an eleven-hour watch, and rake the 
ash-pits and clean fires two or three times, and 
do divers other tasks ? Who cares — when 
there 's Janet to come home to at night, with 
such a welcome as the King of Fairyland could 
not command and his Queen, I '11 wager, could 
not give? 

Such was our life at Vicksburg in those 
happy days of January and February, 1901. 
Six days I shoveled coal on the big dredge, 
and on the seventh — no — you read that in 
the Bible. I did not rest. Dredge companies 
know no commandment except *' Thou shalt 
keep hustling," and their motto is " The wages 

212 



VICKSBURG AND HARD LABOR 

of fail is fire." On Sunday we cleaned up the 
dredge. The night man drew the fires at six 
o'clock, and then went to that diabolical in- 
vention called a " back connection chamber " 
which is just back of the fire-arch, and which 
was full of a week's accumulation of impal- 
pable ash-dust, red-hot from the flames which 
had played over it six days without cessation. 
He opened a tiny manhole on the floor and 
thrust in the end of a hose and wet down the 
ashes inside. At seven I came on duty, and 
opening the manhole attacked the dust, which 
was dry again by this time and still hot, though 
not as hot as before. I thrust the shovel in 
and threw a little of the dust over the arch, 
scraped and shoveled and made a tiny opening, 
then down on my belly and crawled through 
the manhole into — well, I landed just where 
Dante must have been at one stage of his jour- 
ney. I had left all hope behind without seeing 
the legend. It was hot. The dust rose in 
clouds and stifled me. It was dark save for 
the glimmer of my torch. And for an hour or 
so I shoveled that dust over the arch. I knelt 
and bowed my head, every now and then rais- 

213 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

ing it and striking it against the hot pipes over- 
head in which was steam at one hundred and 
seventy- five pounds to the square inch. If the 
dust had not kept the place hot enough those 
hot pipes would. 

When I had that clone — or maybe it was 
before — I had the pleasant task of crawling 
into the furnace doors, over hot grate bars, and 
with a cold-chisel and a coal hammer going 
around the walls of the firebox and chiseling 
away a week's accumulation of clinker — 
clinker often red-hot. Then the ash-pits must 
be raked and the ashes shoveled to one side, 
and after that I had to get up steam on the 
donkey boiler and then we — the fireman and I 
— tackled the " combustion chamber " together. 
That was a place they never showed Dante. It 
is the thirty-third degree of hereafter. When 
one of the devils, long acclimated to the hottest 
there is, gets bad, they put him into the com- 
bustion chamber. It is back of and over the 
boiler, where the gases are supposed to be 
burned. It is at the foot of the big stack. One 
climbs through a tiny manhole, and standing 
on the hot steampipes or on a tile laid over 

214 



VICKSBURG AND HARD LABOR 

them, picks up one by one a lot of tiles laid 
between the pipes and lets the soot that has 
gathered in a week drop through to the back 
connection. The dry soot rises in the upward 
air current the moment it is disturbed. You 
have been careful to shut the dampers in the 
chimney and cut ofif what draft you can, at 
the cost of an awful heat, but still the air goes 
up. Your feet burn. You cannot even touch the 
pipes around you, except with leather gloves, 
and you handle the tiles with a trowel. That 
is too hot for any man. The fireman and the 
coal-passer used to take turns at it on our boat, 
each working five minutes or so at a time. 
One day my lantern exploded, it was so hot 
in there. After that we used a torch. When 
all our work was done the great centrifugal 
pump had to be put together — for all this 
while the engineers and deck hands had been 
cleaning it. Sometimes the " cutter " on the 
end of the suction had to be brought up and 
cleaned or overhauled. There were countless 
things to do. It was late afternoon before 
Sunday ended on the dredge — and not till as 
a last thing I had crawled through a fourteen- 

215 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

inch porthole into the wood-bunkers and passed 
out a big pile of cord-sticks to start the fires 
again, and had started them and had passed 
out enough coal to keep them going till the 
night gang came on duty. Sunday was no day 
of rest with me in Vicksburg. 

And yet I think it was the second week that 
was the hardest there, for on Sunday the gangs 
shifted and we became the night crew, going 
on at six Monday evening and working thir- 
teen hours without let-up. At first Janet used 
to put up a lunch for me to take, and then I 
would start away with much misgiving. There 
were rough characters on the river, and this 
levee was the worst spot in Vicksburg. To 
leave her alone in our little cabin all night 
was hard. Nervous as she was she faced it 
bravely and bore the strain like a heroine. I 
used to see the light in her window from the 
deck of the dredge, and know that she sat at 
the table reading or writing, with a pistol by 
her side, till long after midnight. Then in the 
morning, when worn by the long toil, I would 
come whistling alongside and rap on the deck 
— well, there 's no use in telling. The world 

216 



VICKSBURG AND HARD LABOR 

was new and fresh every morning. Love was 
not a new story, but love itself was new, new 
as the pristine morn each day. It was worth 
working for. I used to turn in and try to 
sleep after breakfast while she cleaned the 
house and went away marketing, and then all 
day, when we should have been rambling or 
rollicking together, she must sit still as a mouse 
for fear of waking me. It was harder on her 
than on me. We had a little relief, however, 
after the first week, when I had better learned 
my work. I used to throw out a couple of tons 
of coal into the firehold, then climb into the 
punt and go home and visit with my wife till 
I heard the fireman's merry hail of " More 
coal, — MORE COAL, YOU Coal-passer." 
I had my suppers home at midnight, then. 

We had some lessons in the cost of liv- 
ing there, and they concerned more things 
than the table supply. My high-priced shoes 
were not long proof against the hot ashes, 
the continual wetting of the floor in the 
firehold. I went up the hill, on the advice of 
the fireman, and bought a pair of " brogans " 
for one dollar and twenty-five cents. They 

217 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

were crude, heavy, solid shoes, that hurt my 
feet till I got used to them. But there was no 
wear out to them. To go in them I bought 
several pair of socks at five cents a pair — un- 
dyed cotton. Whether it is the dye that makes 
costly stockings rotten, or whether there is 
some other trouble, I do not know ; but I wore 
these five cent socks through many weeks of 
coal shoveling, and again for weeks on the 
river, and then for more weeks on an island 
in Maine, and then threw them away because 
I could not wear them in civilization. They 
were still, most of them, undarned. They were 
the original holeproof. And as for the bro- 
gans, after two months in Vicksburg and a 
month en route to New Orleans, they were still 
apparently unscarred and unworn, hard as iron 
and equally durable. So I gave them to the 
old darky who was watchman for us at New 
Orleans, despite Janet's protest that they would 
be too big for him. 

" Coal-passer! " If I should hear the name 
shouted out to-day, I would reach for a shovel 
as instinctively as a bargee ducks at " low 
bridge." It was my only name, and after a 

218 



VICKSBURG AND HARD LABOR 

while it became a family designation. The 
crew of the dredge had grown curious about 
us, and used daily to watch Janet as she 
climbed the hill from the boat toward town. 
When she came back from the postoffice and 
brought me mail she would come down toward 
the dredge-landing instead of toward the Easy 
Way, and in a minute I would hear a hail from 
deck: 

"Here's Coal-passer's wife. Hey! Coal- 
passer! Your wife wants you." 

Gone is the memory of the aching back. 
Faded into nothing is the heat of the combus- 
tion chamber and the back connection. Yorcke, 
the chief engineer, is no more than the memory 
of a man who told me in confidence how back 
in his home town of Charleston the Confeder- 
ates captured Fort Sumter from the British by 
building a raft of palmetto logs that soaked 
up cannonballs like a sponge soaks up water. 
The hardships were evanescent things. The 
real — that struggling together, that growing 
assurance of each other's dependability, that 
knitting of man and wife as each showed 
greater capacity and willingness to do for the 

219 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

other; the sense of having done a day's work 
for a day's pay, of having demonstrated that a 
worker with his wits could do a man's work 
with his muscles as well and not fail at it, 
and that a woman bred as Janet was could carry 
herself so bravely through those days of pri- 
vation — those things are as fresh with us to- 
day as they were then. The two months, as we 
look back on them, stand for a wholly unique, 
and a wonderfully valuable experience that 
not for the world would we give up. 



220 



CHAPTER XIII 

NEIGHBORS GOOD AND BAD IN 
SHANTY-BOAT TOWN 

Shanty-boat Town at Vicksburg was as com- 
plete a ward of the greater shanty community 
as one could find from " Oklahoma " to Algiers. 
In the new canal were some score or more of 
boats of all descriptions, from a tiny " band- 
box " shanty which had for a day moored be- 
side us at Lake Providence, to the stately Car- 
rie Houston, which was said to have a piano 
aboard and to have come from Cincinnati, or 
the Robin Adair of Wheeling, West Virginia, 
whose owners wanted five hundred dollars for 
the stripped hull when they would have com- 
pleted their journey. 

All these boats lay before a somewhat abrupt 
bank about four feet in height when we landed, 
though as the river fell it became higher. A 
big coal flat from the Ohio river bumped 
against the sterns of them save when the wind 

221 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

blew it to the other shore. The naphtha 
launch Vessie, running in and out of the 
canal, kept them bobbing with her waves, and 
from their decks men and women hailed each 
other, waved signals, or stepped ashore for a 
gossip on the bank. On the bank itself was 
a not less heterogeneous assembly of stranded 
" shanties." To the north, where the dredges 
were working, lived a one-legged Negro ferry- 
man who with his skiff carried whatever pas- 
sengers would go to the upper side of West 
Pass or even to Delta, Louisiana. He lived 
in a dilapidated red shanty which some earlier 
flood had deposited high on the bank. Its win- 
dows were gone long ago, and its door was 
but a memory of former grandeur. But it 
served as a habitation and a certificate that the 
one-legged ferryman might be admitted to the 
community without question and free of taxes. 
Not far from him in an even less respectable 
cabin, perched on puncheons a foot above the 
ground, lived a " nigger gal " and her chickens. 
These latter were not metaphorical but verita- 
ble, and hopped in and out of the door with as 
much freedom as new members came and went 

222 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

in our community. At the head of the slope, 
on the firm ground beside the railroad, in a 
new, white tent with a board floor, lived the 
owners of the Vcssie, a family from Michigan, 
working their way south for pleasure and stop- 
ping here for profit. Charlie Fletcher, who 
ran the boat, lived aboard of her, and soon 
became one of our firm friends. We had met 
him on the street in Memphis where he had 
accosted us to learn if our mail had been for- 
warded from Cairo. As it happened a letter 
with money in it had come that way. 

"You left a forwarding notice," said he; 
" and as you went away the postmaster let it 
blow out of the window. I saw it, and picked 
it up and took it back again." 

Not far from the tent camp was the fish 
dock, a stranded flatboat with a sheltering roof, 
and with the counters and scales of a regular 
store; but with none of the restrictions as to 
the disposal of garbage which would have wor- 
ried a town fishmonger. 

On the surface there was nothing out of the 
way hereabouts. Poverty was obvious, loose 
morals are common on the river, but the truth 

223 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

that there was within a stone's throw a half- 
world community was for a time happily veiled. 
Many things had passed under Janet's eye up 
the river from which she had learned much; 
but she had only inferred, never seen actually 
bad conditions. On the Vicksburg levee she was 
suddenly confronted with vice. Characterless 
Negro women occupied little red shanty-boats 
which lay high and dry at the crest of the flood 
line some distance from us; but near at hand 
was a more pitiful example. In search of a 
washerwoman Janet went one day to a big, red 
shanty-boat close at hand, and found a girl and 
a miserable old hag fighting their way against 
the last extreme of poverty. The girl, not yet 
fifteen years old, was about to become a mother. 
The embittered old woman, a virago, was so 
emaciated it was horrible to behold her. To 
Janet she tersely told her daughter's story, the 
subject of it moving at first defiantly, then apa- 
thetically, about the cabin while she talked. 
Janet hastily arranged for the washing and 
hurried home, revolted, shamed, almost stunned 
by the frankness of the tale. For days she 
suffered over the cruelty and misery she had 

224 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

fairly glimpsed. Our washing, as did that of 
all the more prosperous levee folks, went to 
that wretched cabin the remaining weeks of 
our stay. Thus we eased our consciences of an 
unargued sense of obligation to the poor vic- 
tims of conditions for which Society rather 
than themselves was responsible. 

At the very mouth of the canal were the 
Davises, from Montrose, Iowa, the same who 
had been sought but not found by the young 
man of the box nets and the White river. 
They had been among those brought to shore 
at Arcadia to assist in the lynching, and gave 
us a detailed description of the whole crime 
and its sudden avenging. They lived in an 
old house boat, double-hulled, originally a float- 
ing home for a naphtha launch, which they had 
floored over between the hulls and converted 
into a cabin boat. One or two of the family 
were sick at Vicksburg and went to the hos- 
pital. The boys worked for the dredging com- 
pany in the shore gang. 

Farther in, immediately adjoining the Easy 
Way, was a tiny, white boat, the picture 
of neatness, called the Snowball of PaducaJi. 

225 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

This snowball looked like the home of content- 
ment and comfortable prosperity — as river 
property goes. In the doorway as we first 
landed stood a neat-appearing young woman 
of perhaps twenty-six, with flaxen hair and 
pink-and-white cheeks and blue eyes. She had 
an innocent expression about her, and a neat- 
ness that bespoke the contented bride — which 
expression was later belied by blackened eyes 
and tears and a change of partners. Billy, her 
" husband " as we at first supposed, was less 
attractive — a low-browed, taciturn, ignorant 
young man. May — so the Snowball Queen 
was called — paid us a visit on our arrival. 
Janet was cleaning house in my absence, when, 
the doors and windows all being open, she was 
surprised by the tilting of the boat as someone 
stepped unbidden to our deck. This in itself 
was a breach of river etiquette sufhciently start- 
ling, but, on turning, my wife was even more 
surprised to see May, bareheaded and smiling, 
standing in the doorway. 

'' Haowdy," said the visitor, cheerily, and 
in a somewhat tentative manner, as if asking 
how she was to be received. 

226 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

" Why, — good morning," said Janet, cheer- 
fully. 

That was invitation enough, and May began 
a critical inspection of all we owned. It was 
at this moment that my wife discovered that 
May was chewing tobacco — not merely snuff- 
dipping, but masticating real plug. Never hav- 
ing seen a woman engaged in this delightful 
occupation, Janet was startled — perhaps no 
less by the contrast between May's neat ap- 
pearance and her filthy practice. Her jaw 
dropped and she stared impolitely but effec- 
tually. 

" Oh ! " said May, nonchalantly, perceiving 
the effect she had created and rightly guessing 
its cause. " Y' all don't chew tobacco. Does 
yuh?" 

"No," said Janet, quite truthfully; "I do 
not." 

" Why, up no'th," said May, with the air of 
one carelessly delivering a home shot, " up no'th 
all the ladies chews tobacco." 

Thus having settled all Janet's pretensions 
to gentility in Shanty-boat Town or elsewhere, 
May went home. My wife sat on the edge of 

227 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

the be3 and laughed till the tears came, and 
was still in a state between merriment and in- 
dignation when I arrived to hear the tale. 
Others came and went, but May and Billy 
never again darkened our doors. We were set- 
tled for them. With studied rudeness they 
made our deck a sidewalk in their visits to the 
Goodward boat on the other side of us. But 
their only intercourse with us at Vicksburg was 
a surly nod of greeting from their own door- 
way. 

Yet there I err. I did have a moment's war 
with Billy on the second day, when he heard 
I had engaged as coal-passer. Billy had in- 
tended to take that job himself. When he had 
been a week in camp he had in fact applied 
and had been engaged, but had told Captain 
Nelson he would n't be ready to go to work 
for a few days yet. He wanted to get rested 
up after his trip down the river. This resting 
process had now lasted ten days or more, during 
which he had loafed before his boat with re- 
peated assurances that pretty soon he would 
" taken to wo'k." Now as he saw the job 
vanish before his eyes he believed that not an- 

228 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

other one was to be had of the company. As 
a matter of fact there was scarcely a sizeable 
village on the whole lower river in that day, 
where the willing man could not find work at 
good wages. But Billy was as angry out- 
wardly as he was relieved inwardly, and vented 
his wrath in a wordy attack on me. It comes 
back dimly to me now, as the only unkindly 
word spoken to us by river folks, except that 
of a drunken man at Morris, which after all 
was on the canal. 

In this dispute with Billy it was that I first 
gained the moral support and then the intimate 
acquaintance of Old Man Good'a'd, than whom 
I know no more loyal friend on the whole 
great waterway. He stood on the deck of his 
boat as Billy and I argued — a tall, square- 
shouldered, powerfully built, but ineffably lazy, 
long-bearded, brown-eyed patriarch. When 
Billy had gone and I stood alone, the victor of 
the field, he addressed me in words of encour- 
agement. 

** That 's jes' right, Jawn," he called, evi- 
dently having heard my name through our open 
windows. "That's jes' right! Billy, he's a 

229 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

good boy, but he ain't got no mo' call on that 
job 'n what I have. He jes' been a-lazyin' heah 
an' nothin' I c'd say 'Id git him to wo'kin. You 
got a mighty good job an' I 'm glad of hit. 
If I was a strong man I 'd taken to wo'k my- 
self. I wisht they was anotheh job jes' like 
youhs, an' if I was a bit pearter, dinged ef I 
would n't go afteh hit." 

In all of our acquaintance with Good'a'd I 
never secured a more intimate glimpse into his 
nature than through that first short speech — 
unless it was from a story Billy Householder 
told me of him one day when, having broken 
a steamboat journey down the river, I lounged 
with him in the autumn of 1903 under the 
browning hickories on the shore of the bayou 
St. John. 

" What 's the latest from Goodward? " I had 
asked him; and with a chuckle Billy, who con- 
siders himself the most accomplished junk re- 
mover on the river, replied: 

" Good'a'd ? Say, let me tell you what he 
done. Last time I was in Vicksbu'g he was 
there, and dinged if the old rip did n't take 
and steal a whole sack of brasses off'n the rail- 

230 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

road. And then he brung 'em to his boat, and 
he an' the old woman and Buddy held prayers 
over 'em. Great character Good'a'd is ! " 

We had his story from his own lips. He 
had been a preacher down in Texas, but grow- 
ing lazy and having a good chance to trade off 
his congregation, he had abandoned such irk- 
some tasks as the pulpit furnished him and had 
taken to the river. With his family now con- 
sisting of a wife and two sons, he drifted slowly 
downstream, stopping weeks or even months 
at places that pleased him, trading boats, log- 
ging in eddies, stealing junk or whatever of- 
fered, holding occasional church services or 
prayer meetings on board and taking up an 
inevitable collection; and, when he had gone 
as far down as Natchez, hiring a tow from 
some upbound coal boat and going back to 
Memphis. 

He was reputed a deep thinker, and evidently 
deserved the reputation, as we soon had cause 
to know. We heard him hail the Adventist 
preacher who had come to the levee for mis- 
sionary work. 

" Howdy, Pahson," he called. 
231 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

" Howdy, Brotheh Good'a'd." 

" Pahson," — this thoughtfully, — "! ben 
a-studyin/ Does y'all reckon, Pahson, that 
they have ships in Heaven ? " 

The parson was a cautious man, not to be 
too easily drawn into a trap by an adversary. 

"Well, now, Brotheh Good'a'd," he said 
slowly, " that aih is right smaht of a question 
to answeh off-hand like. I 'd need to study oveh 
it quite a bit. But — you know they Ve got 
aih-ships even heah ? " 

" Yasseh," said Brother Good'a'd, as if 
struck by this apt suggestion, — " Yasseh, Pah- 
son, I reckon that 's so. Hit 's sholey so. But 
Pahson, don't you-all reckon that if they do 
have ships to Heaven, they '11 jes' shove us 
riveh folks oveh onto Shanty-boat side ? " 

Vicksburg without Good'a'd would be no 
Vicksburg at all to us. We visited it later and 
it was but a hollow mockery of the place we 
knew. And Good'a'd would not be Good'a'd to 
us now, for Sambuno would be grown up. 

Sambuno — known more commonly by his 
chosen nickname of " lody " — was a hand- 
some, sunny, yellow-haired boy of two years. 

232 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

He was such a healthy, happy, strong-legged, 
independent youngster as many a rich man 
would give a fortune to possess. He was Good- 
'a'd in miniature without the laziness or the 
dishonesty. 

" Sambuno," I remarked reflectively one day 
in the old man's hearing, " where did you get 
that name, Brother Goodward ? It 's an odd 
one." 

" Jawn, I '11 jes' tell you wheh we got that 
name," he said, promptly. " Expectin' of that 
aih chile, we was a-layin' at Buny Visty island, 
the old woman and Buddy and me, and we 
taken a liking to that name. We made up ouh 
minds that ef hit come a gal chile we 'd gi'n 
huh that name, Buny Visty Good'a'd, but ef 
hit come a boy we 'd name him atteh me, 
Samuel. 

" Wal, seh, when hit come a welcome and a 
male chile, somehow we jes' could n't gi'n up 
that name, Buny, so we hitched them two to- 
getheh and called him Sambuno. And it 's a 
high-soundin' name that we ain't neveh had no 
cause to regret." 

By this time the old chap was waxing con- 
233 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

fidential and being on a favorite theme he con- 
tinued: "That aih chile Sambuno, John, is 
prob'ly the only puffick and cawmplete babby 
on the Mississippi riveh. Yasseh! When he 
was a yeah ol' we taken him to a babby show 
at Orleens, and they was a thousand babbies 
went up against him, and not one of 'em could 
tech him. No, seh, not one. When hit come 
to g'in' out the prizes them doctahs gi'n him 
eve'y one they was — yasseh, eve'y one. They 
said he had n't got no waht, mole, mahk, scratch 
noh pimple on his body, — and that 's what 
them doctahs says constitutes a puffick and 
cawmplete babby." 

Sambuno was certainly *' cawmplete " as far 
as we could see. He was the delight of Shanty- 
boat Town and wandered from one end of it 
to the other ruling all who dwelt in it with a 
rod of iron. We enjoyed him greatly — but 
his father more. One day, as my wife started 
to market with a basket in hand, Good'a'd eyed 
her approvingly from his deck. 

"That's right, Mis' Mathews," he called; 
" I read in the Scriptu'es, ' when you ah in 
Vicksbu'g do 's the Romans do.' " 

234 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

Another of our neighbors, and a famous river 
dweller, who came into Vicksburg while we 
were there was "Espanto, the Mexican Indian 
medicine man." " Espanto " was a univer- 
sal genius who had discovered the American 
fondness for humbug and was making full use 
of it. He was traveling in a roomy, substantial 
house boat decorated with signs announcing his 
calling and the mysterious potency of his wares. 
We saw him standing on his gang plank one 
morning, and having been told much about him 
did not hesitate to " take him in." He was 
rather a small man, very dark of face, — we 
were told by one of his former assistants that 
he dyed his face and hands, — with long hair 
braided in a queue and worn down his back. He 
also wore an old-fashioned frock coat, the flar- 
ing skirts of which flapped in the wind. He 
wore no hat. Later, on the Yazoo, when we 
wanted to take a snapshot of him, he unbraided 
his hair and let it flow over his shoulders, as 
he wore it when on " medicine " duty. He was 
from Michigan and his real name was Billy. 

For several years " Espanto " had been 
traveling up and down the river in his boat 

235 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

selling humbug remedies to blacks and whites, 
working all sorts of quack medical dodges, and 
making a comfortable fortune out of it. Clar- 
ence, our neighbor at Memphis, had been his 
assistant one year and told us much about him. 

" His wife is the real brains of the firm," 
said Clarence, ^* though they are both smart 
enough. She runs the medicine part. She 's 
a mighty nice, motherly old lady, and was very 
good to me. Billy puts up the front, fixing his 
hair and his complexion to look like a ' Mexi- 
can Indian ' — as he styles himself. He is a dead 
shot, and has some fine pistols and guns. The 
niggers are afraid of him as he is said to be 
a * voodoo,' but there is no one else they will 
doctor with if they can get him. They come 
miles to get his charms and remedies. 

" At Lake Providence, one cotton time, he 
took in over a thousand dollars in ten days, anci 
then the other doctors got the marshal after 
him for practicing without a license. They took 
him up to the jail and he gave one hundred 
dollars cash bail to come for trial the next 
day. Then he went back to the boat and went 
to work again. He made that one hundred 

236 




c 
a 
w 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

dollars up in no time. The marshal came 
down a second time but Espanto told him 
the waterfront was United States property 
and he would n't be arrested. He stood guard 
with a rifle, so no one dared come over the levee, 
and his wife took in the lines. They dropped 
just below the town limits. That advertised 
them so that they took in a good many hundred 
more in the next week. Billy did n't go back 
for trial and the judge was mad that he had n't 
put the bail at five hundred dollars. Billy would 
have given that just as easy as one hundred." 

Everyone on the river knew Espanto, and 
nearly everyone liked him — that is of the 
river folks. He was rather taciturn, but hos- 
pitable and willing to help those who needed it. 
But the folks on shore either hated or feared 
him. An evidence of his prosperity was his 
offer to the Vessie's owners of one hundred 
dollars to tow him a little way up the Yazoo. 
He finally engaged a boat at a higher figure. 
He expected to get that all back and much more 
in the few weeks he would spend up the river 
of the Delta. 

I met Espanto in St. Louis again in 1903. 
237 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

He had sold his boat and was visiting friends 
at " Oklahoma," the St. Louis Shanty-boat 
Town. 

" No more river for me/' he said. " I have 
bought a good farm out in this State and my 
wife and I will live in peace the rest of our 
lives." 

" Too many places he can't go back to," said 
another river man. 

The canal at Vicksburg, on which we were all 
living, was being dug to make a harbor for the 
city on the Walnut Hills. In war time Pem- 
berton occupied the bluffs; Grant tried in vain 
to send the river across a neck of land back of 
De Soto, Louisiana, to cut off the city. After 
the war, however, the river took a turn to go 
that way itself, and about a mile from the 
" Grant Canal " made a cut-off, leaving Vicks- 
burg inland some two miles, on the shore of a 
beautiful crescent lake — Centennial lake — 
which soon became landlocked except at ex- 
treme high water. 

Vicksburg was too dead to move down to the 
new levee at Kleinston. It was completely pros- 
trate for a long time after the war. It waited 

238 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

impatiently for the federal government to bring 
its river back to it. Many attempts were made 
to do this^ most of them by damming up " West 
Pass " — the head of Centennial lake — and 
dredging a canal at the foot along the old water- 
front. Whenever the river rose, however, it 
made an eddy up into this canal and filled it 
with silt, so that after each high water it had 
to be dredged again at great expense. At last 
it was decided to bring the Yazoo down past 
Vicksburg. That charming little stream flow- 
ing along the front of the line of hills — the 
same line on which are Hickman and Columbus 
and Memphis, Fort Adams, Baton Rouge and 
Port Hudson — emptied into an " old river " 
similar to Centennial lake and separated from 
it only by a narrow strip of bottomland. Ac- 
cordingly two huge suction dredges attacked 
the old channel at Kleinston ; and a big dipper 
dredge cut out the strip between the lakes. The 
Yazoo soon found a new and shorter course 
open to it, to the Mississippi. Naturally it chose 
this mode of exit, and Vicksburg stood on its 
hills and cheered as the sluggish current found 
its way past the old levee. 

239 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

Comedy smiled on us through tears in Vicks- 
burg. Away back at New Madrid I had sent 
two stories to McClnre's magazine. At Ar- 
kansas City I had received an acceptance. And 
now in the hour of need, I received my pay- 
ment. It came on a rainy day — such a rainy 
day as the Mississippi had not seen since the 
weather bureau was estabHshed. In thirty-six 
hours nearly eleven inches of rain fell, and 
most of it fell on a single day. It came down 
the face of the great bluffs in an awful tor- 
rent, and swept into the canal a deluge of mud 
to fill the cut the dredges had made. It soaked 
and battered the bank till the earth settled of 
its own weight. And it pounded out the last 
remnant of paint in the roof of the Easy 
Way — still unpainted since its soaking at New 
Madrid — and came through in an increasing 
number of places. Bit by bit my lady retreated, 
until at night, when I came slumping home 
from work through a sea of mud and slopped 
down the soggy bank to the deck, I found her 
seated in the only dry spot in the boat, — the 
middle of the bed, — which remained dry as 
long as she protected it. There she sat, sur- 

240 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

rounded by watersoaked furniture and bed- 
ding, with tears in her eyes, but tears of joy. 
She was waving a letter and a check. 

We laugh now when we think of that check. 
It represented the total payment for two stories 
found worthy of being printed in McClure's 
magazine, — the size of payment offered to 
young and inexperienced writers who do not 
know what they should be paid. 

It was exactly thirty-five dollars for two; 
seventeen dollars and fifty cents each. Ac- 
companied by a personal letter from the 
editor-in-chief! Cheaper than newspaper 
space ! Ah, well — others have been stung 
the same way; and in this case it stood us in 
well, for it came in the hour of need. It meant 
comfort in a hotel till the boat dried out, and 
plenty of paint for the roof. Into a grip 
quickly went a change of clothes, — hitherto 
kept dry in a trunk, — and out into the storm 
went we, without umbrella or delay. The near- 
est cab or carriage was a mile away. There 
was no available telephone in an equal distance. 
The mud precluded bringing one near the boat, 
and there was no use trying to get one any- 

241 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

way. The hotel was two miles off, but we 
started thither on foot. The roads were im- 
passible, so we took the easier grade up the 
railway tracks, walking between the rails in 
a flood which swept the top of the steel. Half 
an hour later, drenched to the skin, muddy and 
bedraggled, but very happy, we dripped our 
way across the rotunda of the big hotel, 
demanded a good room, a hot bath, an open 
fire, and a hot toddy. We were lords of the 
land now, and as long as the check lasted we 
remained so. It must have amused the curi- 
ous Vicksburglars — I know it did the dredge 
crew — to see the coal-passer coming to work 
every day from one of the chief hotels of the 
city. But there was no use taking my wife 
back to the Easy Way till the cabin was dry 
and the roof painted. Later, when we had 
saved up considerable from my wages, money 
suddenly poured in from all directions, and 
being thus in ample funds I resigned my task, 
and to the amazement of all our neighbors 
we became again people of leisure. 

We made from Vicksburg a very pleasurable 
side trip up the Yazoo river. It is two hun- 

242 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

dred and forty miles up that stream to Green- 
wood. Several little steamers were in the trade, 
and to the agent of the line we applied for 
round-trip prices. He suggested sixteen dol- 
lars each, including meals and berth, for the 
week's trip. We thought we could do better, 
and went to Captain Richardson of the Rees 
Prit chard. He looked us over, said " bride and 
groom " to himself, and made a bid for our 
patronage. 

" You mean to go right up and back? " he 
asked. 

" Yes." 

" All right at once ? You don't want to stop 
theh?" 

" No." 

" Well — Jake, look up them rate sheets. I 
do' know 's I eveh made a rate jes' that way. 
Let me see — suppose we say fifteen dollahs." 

"Apiece?" 

" Oh, no, seh. Foh the two of you." 

We paid it on the spot, went home and en- 
gaged a Negro to keep watch over our boat 
from his post on a neighboring coal flat, re- 
quested Charlie Fletcher, of the Vessie, to keep 

243 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

an eye on the (larky, packed our grips and 
boarded the steamer. 

Captain Richardson was a southern gentle- 
man of the truest sort, — soft of voice, quick 
of temper, courtly in manner and in action. 
To be sure he nearly broke his hand hammer- 
ing the head of a Negro who had laughed at 
him, and had thus made him so mad he could 
not wait to get a club. But also he saved the 
life of a drowning rat and supported it till it 
was strong enough to steal for itself. 

We taught the captain to play parchesi, and 
spent happy days in the lofty pilot house at 
the game while he regaled us with stories of 
the river. We came back through Tchula 
lake, where trees brushed the cabin windows 
on both sides at the same time, and where a 
snowstorm, a most unusual thing there, beset 
us and drove us to the bank. When at last we 
came again into the Mississippi and in sight 
of the Walnut Hills, we said farewell to the 
kindly captain with regret. 

" I 'm mighty sorry to see y' all go," he said. 
" I do' know when I Ve enjoyed a trip so. Come 
on right back up with us — you-all ain't in any 

244 



NEIGHBORS, GOOD AND BAD 

hurry. Come up and back again and it won't 
cost you a cent. I would n't liave charged you 
this time if I 'd knowed what fun we would 
have." 

But the season was growing late and we were 
in something of a hurry after all. So we said 
good-bye at the levee and began preparations 
for quitting our two-months' mooring. 

As we completed them it was with real satis- 
faction that we looked back on this season of 
hard labor, realizing that through it and with 
it we had received the accolade which entitled 
us to sit at the Round Table of Philosophical 
Vagabonds. 



245 



CHAPTER XIV 

OUR journey's end 

It was on the morning of the first of March 
that we left Vicksburg — a soft, balmy day 
without a suggestion of a breeze. The glassy 
surface of the river was only broken here and 
there by eddies. The strong current swept 
us swiftly away from Kleinston while a score 
of our old shanty-boat neighbors waved us 
farewell. 

Brother Good'a'd stood on his landing stage 
as I took the lines, and mildly censured me for 
leaving so good a job as I had held. 

" You-all won't get a two-dollah job every- 
wheh you go, Jawn," he said. '' Two dollahs 
is right smaht pay foh a young fellow nowa- 
days. You git off heah down the riveh some- 
wheh and you '11 wish mighty you was back 
passin' coal again." 

"Why don't you take the job?" I asked. 
246 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

" They 're looking for someone — three chaps 
have tried it since I quit." 

" Yasseh," said Brother Good'a'd, smiHng. 
" Yasseh, Jawn, that 's sholey so. And I 
reckon I would taken it, but I ain't jes' peart 
the las' few days and I feel like I got to res' 
a little longer." 

He stood foremost among our neighbors as 
we drew out from shore, sending after us his 
benediction. 

" I won't say good-bye, Jawn," he called after 
us. " I 'm a-comin' down soon myself. Likely 
I '11 ovehtake you-all befo' you get to Natchez." 

*' Why not come now?" I asked, knowing 
that his present boat was a harbor craft, un- 
safe for travel. 

" Well, seh, I '11 tell you why. Yestiddy, 
Buddy he taken to wo'k. I reckon now we '11 
stay heah till Buddy git ti'd of wo'kin'. Maybe 
to-morrow, maybe next day, we come off down 
riveh." 

We drifted out of the canal and past Klein- 
ston while the hands waved and the farewells 
rang out, and then, as Vicksburg gradually 
faded away astern, settled down to our almost 

247 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

forgotten routine of travel. We were a little 
timid about drifting now. We felt some of 
that wonder and fear which Clarence had 
spoken of at Memphis. We understood the 
river better. We knew more of its might. We 
were a little in awe of it. Yet once we were 
well away, and drifting gently on its placid 
surface, my wife climbed again to the roof, 
where I had placed a steamer chair for her, 
and read aloud or talked, while I sat in a 
straight chair on deck, my sweeps held lightly 
in my hands, and from time to time leaned 
forward to push on them, to check some shore- 
ward impulse of the boat. 

It was a real spring day. Red birds and 
mocking-birds were singing in the woods, and 
their song came clearly to us over the still 
water. Flowers were blooming, and the scent 
of growing things was sweet to us. In the 
fields and on the hills, beside the river, men and 
mules were at work putting in the cotton. 
This was a cotton country altogether. In Il- 
linois it had been the yellow corn that had 
spelled health and wealth, work and life to the 
people. Here it was the fleecy white staple. 

248 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

The land was alive with it — lived on it. We 
had first come upon it at Island Number Ten. 
At Memphis we were surrounded by it. But 
here, at the foot of the Yazoo, we were able 
to see and hear of nothing else. In Vicksburg 
cotton lay in immense yards, awaiting compress 
and shipment. Oil mills devoured boat and 
trainloads of seed. Darkies drove mules, pell- 
mell, around the city, whisking bales from this 
yard to that, from landing to warehouse, from 
bale-yard to compress. Fleece clung to trees 
and fences. After a walk bits of it adorned 
our clothing. And of all cotton this was the 
finest, for while middling was quoted in New 
York at ten or eleven cents, this Yazoo crop 
was selling in Vicksburg for more than twenty 
cents a pound. 

We had visited gins anH balehouses, com- 
presses and mills at various points. Now we 
watched the new crop going in, the country- 
side astir with its spring liveliness, and felt 
the same masfic in the name of cotton that we 



had in that of corn along the Old Canal. 

Yet not all the world was working. Came 
from a towhead and fell in beside us another 

249 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

house boat, drifting. A gentle wind had risen 
from the Mississippi bank, and I pushed more 
frequently at my sweeps to keep the Easy Way 
in the current. On this other boat a stalwart 
river man, following the custom of his kinH, 
lounged at ease upon the roof, smoking a pipe 
and taking life very comfortably, while his 
other half, well trained and obedient, toiled 
back and forth at the inboard end of a heavy 
ash sweep. The upsetting of tradition on our 
boat filled them with wonder. The man took 
his pipe from his teeth and pointed at me. 

" Hi, there. Matey," he shouted across the 
intervening flood. " Why don't you make your 
old woman work them sweeps? " 

It was a friendly question, and no doubt 
contained a good suggestion. But I never car- 
ried it out. 

March winds on the lower river are tradi- 
tionally hard. They blew every day in inces- 
sant gales for a week, while we struggled 
through the snaggy intricacies of Hard Times 
bend — a week of brilliant moonlight nights, 
during which we steadfastly refused to break 
our rule against night traveling. 

250 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

Those were hard and tiresome days in Hard 
Times bend. Never was a place more justly 
named. One Sunday morning we landed early 
where our chart called for Ship Bayou land- 
ing, and pail in hand, set out to find a planta- 
tion and buy some milk and eggs. There was 
a big cypress forest close at hand, and where 
we had landed an old field grown with grass 
and marked here and there with those peculiar 
old field-cypresses with immense trunks and 
very small tops, characteristic of such a re- 
claimed piece of ground. This tract was half 
a mile wide and extended back as far as we 
could see, and in it and through the woods 
cattle were grazing. We were sure a habita- 
tion must be near. We walked three or four 
miles back, and came to nothing but diminish- 
ing cattle trails, the swamp and a lake. We 
found not a sign of people. 

Wearily we retraced our steps. The wind 
was sweeping with tremendous force across the 
river, and the boat pitched and tossed. The 
whistling in the crevices worked on our nerves. 
We escaped but one thing, — the dust cloud. 
The opposite sandbar yielded to the storm a 

251 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

burden of light dust which swept clear across 
the mile-wide river and back on the land, 
but fortunately we were below the range of 
it. 

Another day we had worked down to Hard 
Times landing, and found a collection of dis- 
satisfied darkies laboring for a Jewish family, 
who had been using the whip to make them 
work. They were getting ready to move away, 
they told us, as we were buying pullets of them. 

"Where is old Ship Bayou landing?" we 
asked. 

" Why, Marsah, that done wash in the river, 
houses and all, ten years ago. They ain't no- 
body up there now but them wild cattle that 
bred from the old plantation stock. Must be 
thousands of 'em that don't belong to nobody." 

That was why we could not find Ship Bayou 
landing. The river had swallowed it. We lay 
two or three days longer at this landing, work- 
ing at stories, fidgeting through tiresome days 
of wind and waves, and then, having stayed too 
long on a falling river, I had to wade in with 
my axe and cut away an underwater snag to 
get the boat free. 

252 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

In despair we cut out and ran by moonlight, 
and got caught in a storm below Grand Gulf. 
But we landed without a great deal of trouble. 
The wind used to rise about ten in the morn- 
ing, lapse at noon, come again at two o'clock 
and blow till after four. It was very regular 
in its hours, and we ran with some facility 
while it was slack. But we were for three days 
windbound at Shamrock store and then driven 
hard aground on a bar at Greene's bayou in 
Giles' bend, where we stayed five days waiting 
for a rise — which we knew from upriver 
bulletins was coming — to set us free. 

That was not a bad delay. We were but 
five miles overland from Natchez, so we chart- 
ered a *' nigger rig," — a buggy with no two 
wheels alike and none of them painted ; a flea- 
bitten horse of no particular kind; no back to 
the buggy seat and no top to the vehicle. It 
rattled and sighed and slumped away, but with 
it the horse climbed a gorgeous sunken road 
through gullies and ravines, through forests of 
yellow pine and thickets of dogwood and red- 
bud — up to the top of the bluflf on which 
Natchez is, and from which we had a broad 

253 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

outlook over the great horseshoe of Marengo 
bend. We created a sensation in Natchez, rid- 
ing about the principal residence streets of the 
ancient capital in this old rig, dressed in our 
honeymoon clothes, reading aloud a great bunch 
of letters, admiring the camelias, now in full 
bloom, and the broad-spreading live oaks and 
deep-green magnolias which make the city so 
attractive. We capped it all by registering the 
horse at the hotel and setting him up to his 
first dinner of oats — for which he skipped all 
the way home as if he had been rejuvenated. 

Later we floated by the town — past the great 
blufif and the tiny settlement at its foot, once 
so wicked, now so commonplace. A couple of 
days brought us to Fort Adams, and the " Line 
of 31," a century ago the southern boundary 
of the United States. This was the scene of 
Wilkinson's treason, and we studied the land 
with much interest. Another day we drifted 
past the mouth of the Red river, as we ate 
breakfast, and on our right saw the first river- 
side church since we had left Cairo. 

We were on the " coast " now, — the upper, 
the " German " coast. On both sides there was 

254 




A view of Natchez and Vidalia 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

no longer forest, but green batture, fronting a 
green-clad levee ; and over the tops of that the 
roofs of cottages peeping. Each side was but 
a long village street, houses fronting the levee, 
and the fields sweeping away back of them to 
the swamps. On the right all this land drained 
away from the Mississippi to the Gulf, as it 
did also on the left after we passed bayou 
Manchac. We were in a busy land down there. 
Steamers passed us frequently, in the prosper- 
ous Red river trade, carrying cotton and seed, 
sugar, rice, syrup, stave bolts and all the rich 
products of the Red and Washita. 

The river was narrow approaching its end. 
It was not more than a third of a mile, — a 
sixth as wide as it had been at Plum point. 
But it was very deep, — over one hundred feet. 
There were no bars, no snags, no obstructions 
of any sort. For three hundred miles ahead 
of us stretched this deep canal, with ample 
room and depth for the largest ships in the 
world to turn and to manoeuvre. It was a 
populous stream. Every hour of the day, as 
we lounged on deck, idly enjoying the glorious 
spring weather, voices of children calling across 

255 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

the river came to us from both sides; the 
sounds of men working, the sounds of barn- 
yard animals. It was a homely land, with a 
flavor of quaintness and old-worldliness. We 
used to sit on our roof those days with our 
chart open and check off the names of the plan- 
tations as we passed them. Sometimes there 
were immense mansions, some of them very 
costly, — the grand mansions of the sugar 
lands. Sometimes there were mere shells of 
former wooden palaces, sheltered by deep 
groves of cedar and live oak. These oaks and 
the thickets which bordered the river at the pro- 
jecting points were hung with long Spanish 
moss, so that in some reaches there was not 
a single definite line to be seen, only waving, 
indefinable mystery. 

Yet we were not to have such lovely weather 
all the way. We came one night in sight of 
the " Scott-esque " turrets of the ancient capi- 
tol at Baton Rouge, and after a day in town 
passed down the river to find shelter from a 
threatening storm. We found no harbor, but 
moored to a steep bank, as high as our roof, 
with the water one hundred feet deep directly 

256 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

back of us. In the middle of the night a 
cyclone or a hurricane struck us, coming 
across the river. It cut a wide swath through 
a belt of trees, tore down some houses, and 
ripping the Easy Way from her mooring, sent 
her broadside against the bank, plunging and 
pounding as if she would go to pieces any- 
minute. For three hours we pounded there, 
while the crests of the waves went over our 
roof and the waves themselves crashed against 
our walls and windows. In that time we 
thanked our lucky stars for all the bolts, the 
braces, the keelsons, the strong iron bands that 
made our hull so heavy and strong. Not a 
drop of water entered it nor a seam started; 
yet when daylight came and the storm abated, 
there lay the wreck of a larger boat, a quarter 
of a mile away, from which the people had 
barely escaped; and on our line hung one 
broken board as a reminder that we had once 
had a skiff. 

At no other time in the entire trip were we 
in such peril of our lives as we were during 
that hurricane. These terrible storms often 
wreck buildings, capsize and destroy river 

257 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

steamboats, and cause heavy loss of life. That 
which caught us at Baton Rouge was memo- 
rable for its ferocity. To escape from our cabin 
was impossible, for the bank was steep, the 
waves washing over our deck, and the dark- 
ness impenetrable. While Janet clutched a 
lamp in one hand and steadied herself at a 
stanchion with the other, I dragged in from 
the deck some planks with which to barricade 
the windows if the crashing waves broke them 
— as it seemed certain they would. One of 
these planks, through my carelessness, nearly 
cost my wife her life. 

As the storm abated, after three hours of 
terror, Janet threw herself on the bed on her 
back and closed her eyes. The sea was much 
less, and straightening up the cabin, I leaned 
two of the planks against the wall near the 
door. A little later, while I was at the rear of 
the boat, the steamer St. James came in close 
to us, and turning suddenly, sent the full dis- 
charge from her stern wheels at us, tilting the 
boat far over on its side, — farther than the 
hurricane waves had tilted it. One of the 
planks, overbalanced, fell upon Janet, a long 

258 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

spike in the end missing her eye by less than 
half an inch, and scraping, without scratching, 
down the side of her face. The heavy walnut 
wood struck full on the bridge of her nose, 
injuring it so badly that the soreness did not 
leave it for a year, and reducing her, already 
worn by the storm, to a condition of collapse. 
That nearly ended our trip where we lay. 
It seemed that day impossible to go further. 
We drove back to Baton Rouge in a plantation 
carriage for medical aid, and in the afternoon 
I found a quiet little creek big enough for 
the Easy Way, where we moored the boat and 
prepared for a period of rest. It took us a 
while to get over that storm. It had shocked 
and worn us badly. We found a little creek 
and moored in it, and lounged on the grassy 
batture, listening to a myriad of mocking-birds 
which inhabited a neighboring thicket, and 
which mimicked the red-wings which lived be- 
yond the levee. Later we went our way again, 
one foggy morning, past Plaquemine, with the 
big locks half done at the mouth of its bayou, 
past Donaldsonville and the bayou La Fourche, 
past Bonnet Carre, where the river once opened 

259 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

a way to Lake Pontchartrain ; anci at last, on 
a wonderful morning, when we had spent a 
night moored to a tree in an eddy, while float- 
ing debris knocked against our hull, in token 
of rising water, — one beautiful March morn- 
ing, when we had cleared from our mooring 
at four o'clock, and had finished breakfast and 
mounted to the roof at five, — as we sat on 
the roof there came to us softly, but unmistak- 
ably, the smell of the sea and the salt marsh. 
How far away it was we did not know. It 
may have come from a bayou, or from Lake 
Pontchartrain. But from wherever it came, we 
both sensed in it at once a happy augury that 
our journey was nearing an end. 

We sat on the roof that placid morning, 
hand in hand, watching the low, green banks 
glide by. Untended, without need of guidance, 
the Easy Way crossed from bend to bend, 
curved around turns, and kept herself to the 
swiftest water. We counted of¥ the plantations 
as we had done before. We identified them 
all by our wonderful chart. There was a rail- 
road station near at hand, and just as we had 
decided we were abreast of it a train came in 

260 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

and stopped. We came down into a bend hung 
thick with mossy Hve oaks which idled without 
a tremor in the still air. Half-a-dozen men, 
cordeling an oyster lugger upstream, were on 
the shore beneath them. And a little later, 
swinging out from this Twelve Mile point 
with the channel, we suddenly saw, close at 
hand, over the trees ahead, the masts of a 
steamship ; then another and another. We ran 
farther out until we could see down the reach 
we were entering to Nine Mile point, and there 
at its foot lay three big ocean steamships at 
an elevator. 

After all, we had not realized we were so 
near the end. Though we had counted the 
miles, we had been so long afloat it seemed 
as though we could never really arrive. And 
yet we had arrived, or were in sight of the 
end; for those masts were at the wharves of 
New Orleans, and the Easy Way, coming 
steadily down toward them, was fifteen hun- 
dred miles from the river bank where she had 
been built beside that other elevator in Chicago. 

There was a light wind blowing steadily 
upstream from Nine Mile point. It checked 

261 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

the Easy Way and held her motionless. I got 
out the sweeps to row, but a big cypress log, 
buried deep in water, came along, and I caught 
hold of it. Thus for the last time Charles 
William Albright took charge of us. I sat on 
the edge of the deck bareheaded, barefooted, 
in my old working clothes; and my wife 
climbed to the roof and photographed me, as 
a reminder for later days, of how I looked 
on my wedding trip. The big log towed us 
slowly but faithfully down. I put a line on 
it at noontime, and we ate lunch on deck as 
we drifted. So, at one o'clock, we came to 
the end of the reach, and to the big eddy above 
the Southport elevator; and there, against the 
grassy bank, I moored the Easy Way. 

It was an ideal camping place. There was 
a group of willows on the bank, in which song- 
birds — " pops," sparrows, mockers — sang all 
day. The batture and the levee were covered 
with soft grass and clover. The river was 
high and rising, so that our deck was level 
with the bank. There were houses back of the 
levee from which we could obtain supplies, and 
an old darky who had a raft nearby, for catch- 

262 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

ing driftwood in the eddy, could be hired to 
act as watchman while we were away. 

We left the Easy Way moored there and 
walked down the levee to Carrollton, a distance 
of perhaps two miles, and took a trolley car 
to New Orleans, and sent back word to our 
anxious friends that we had arrived. We went 
to the Cafe de la Louisiane and tried their won- 
derful cooking. We explored the quaint old 
city, and in the evening went to the theatre, 
and walked home up the levee late at night. 
And when we had come back we were suddenly 
smitten with a strange, hollow, mournful sen- 
sation, at the knowledge that to-morrow there 
would be no travel; this was the end of the 
journey; this was the last mooring of the 
Easy Way. 

We did not leave her so suddenly. Our 
plans for departure were slow in maturing, 
and finally developed into a trip in a four- 
masted schooner around to the Atlantic Coast. 
But three weeks elapsed before she sailed, and 
in that three weeks we remained aboard the 
Easy Way, enjoying to the full, while we could, 
the little home that had come so far with us. 

263 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

We were indeed at the door of the sea. 
Great coal-tows from Pittsburg, two thousand 
miles inland, came down frequently and moored 
under the opposite point, sometimes with forty 
thousand tons in a tow. And on the same 
spot on which, on one day, I photographed a 
big steamboat starting upstream with her tow 
of empties, on the next I caught a four-masted 
steamship loaded with baled hay and mules for 
the British army, then operating against the 
Boers in South Africa. For Pittsburg and for 
Durban, — for the opposite ends of the world 
— for the sea and for the river, — the two 
boats set out from the same spot with equal 
simplicity and directness, the everyday business 
of the working world. 

The three weeks that remained to us on the 
Easy Way went all too quickly. We sold our 
little boat for a song — but were not to give 
possession until our vessel sailed. Parting 
from it was a great grief. We thought of 
burning it, of setting it adrift, of all the ro- 
mantic ways of disposing it; but they were 
none of them practical and so we sold it. Yet 
for that last three weeks we lived in happy 

264 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

serenity there against the levee, visiting" New 
Orleans every day or so, sight-seeing and shop- 
ping. By night the whispering eddies lulled 
us ; we heard the call of the river as, perhaps, 
we shall hear it no more. 

I know not what it is about the Mississippi 
that lures those who follow it. Its tongues 
are never still. It makes love to its followers 
with the lisping voices of its incessant swirls. 
Again it reaches out fierce waves and treacher- 
ous currents to destroy them. Yet the fascina- 
tion is there; we felt it as Clarence felt it; as 
the woman in Bainbridge creek felt it ; as those 
hosts of others moored along the bank all felt 
it. The river swamps them, destroys their 
boats, lures them like a siren to death; 
and still those who survive will follow it blindly 
to the end. So it has been and so it will be 
with us. Upon our minds rests an indelible 
impression of the vital power of the Great 
Water, and in everything that we have done 
since we moored the Easy Way to its last stakes, 
the call of the river has been strong upon us. 
The Mississippi has taken us for her own, and 
will not even now release us, so that no other 

265 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

work enlists our hearts so strongly as the labor 
of developing the use and the power of the big 
river for the land in which it flows. 

Yet in that lovely April when we lay against 
the Southport bank we believed we were but 
visitors upon it. We returned to the world at 
New Orleans. The Easy Way had become a 
suburban residence. And so at the last, when 
the expressman came at dawn for our freight 
and carried us down to the city and over 
to Algiers to take train to our schooner, it 
was our dwelling, not our boat, that we 
left. 

We left her there under the willows, where 
we had moored her when we came in. The 
flood had risen over the batture, and we went 
in and out on a row of planks, laid over logs. 
The birds were riotous with song that morn- 
ing. The levee clover was sweet and soft. 
Never looked a camp fairer to the eye than 
that ; and as we went for the last time down be- 
hind the earthen rampart to the prosaic wagon 
road, we turned for a final look at the Easy 
^Ciy, — the dear, cosy Easy Way, staunch 
and faithful shelter, — and Janet cried openly 

266 




Our first lugger — glimpsed on Ihe upper coast 




The Easy JJ'ay at the last mooring 



OUR JOURNEY'S END 

and frankly at leaving her, and I wiped the 
tears from my own eyes unashamed. 

Yet though we left the little boat where she 
lay, we carried away with us a rich heritage, — 
mutual adjustment, gained with primitive labor 
of the spirit beneath her roof, which united us 
as years of civilization could not have done; 
a greatly increased efficiency in all practical 
matters; a wider experience which we shared 
in common in the brotherhood of man; an 
unshakable reliance in each other born of hard 
experience in which no failure had marred 
the record; an endowment of clearer and 
wider vision into the meaning of democracy 
that opened the way for long work to come 
and to be carried in partnership; a heritage 
of faith, of sympathy, of determination, of 
philosophy. 

Somewhere, afloat or sunk, is the Easy Way 
to-day, a shelter for shanty-boaters or for 
thieves, one knows not what. We may not 
see, and we may not know; and so memory 
brings up to us ever the picture of the little 
house resting there, cocky, with its rakish 
deck, alert, staunch, able, with its hull and its 

267 



THE LOG OF THE EASY WAY 

roof tight and secure, — the Easy Way that 
had borne us across our country; the Easy 
Way of our honeymoon, with the multitude 
of experiences that make the honeymoon, with 
the poetry of the river trip, with the asso- 
ciation of all those whom we met along the 
way, with our own happiness and fellowship 
and mutual understanding — it is this that we 
remember lying endlessly there, undying, sur- 
rounded by the songs of birds, the sweet odor 
of clover, the fresh green of the levee, and 
the mysterious luring whispers of the mighty 
river. 



268 



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